Better World News

Nursery Rhymes Bring Down the House With Happiness For All

2011-04-26T08:00:00.001-07:00

Nursery Rhymes Bring Down the House

Over the weekend, Edward Reid became an instant celebrity when he brought down the house on "Britain's Got Talent" -- with nursery rhymes! The crowd laughed and jeered when 35-year-old school teacher opened with "Old MacDonald." But his undulating voice won them over as he moved into "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." By the time he concluded with "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands," every pair of hands in the room was, indeed, applauding wildly. Watch the full video: { read more }

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Movements that include everyone - Van Jones at Power Shift

2011-04-23T10:37:00.001-07:00

Movements that include everyone - Van Jones speaking from the heart at Power Shift a few weeks ago - April 2011

Film well worth watching:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlOv8RCkcXE

We are not going to leave anyone out....

No throw away people...

It takes a big heart to nurture everyone ... it is the love in your heart that is stronger than the bullies, polluters

hold on to idealism for the whole human family - not a solar panel - not for a dead planet

must change the entire system, how we treat each other ...

change the whole thing - we want a new system

empowerment of each and everyone to become part of the new system
honey bees-nurturing everyone -- not locus-destroying

Insist government support nurturing not

Collation of every color and every class - can be achieved.
===

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Main Street Moves Against Wall Street - A World Wide Movement

2011-04-17T13:54:00.001-07:00

Opposition to Paying for Capitalism's Crime: A Global Movement (Video)

Saturday 16 April 2011

by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout

Objective economic analysis is difficult to come by in this heated political moment, with deep budget cuts that disproportionately affect the poor and working class while the top one percent of Americans continues to amass wealth at a record pace.

Professor Richard D. Wolff's academic work and public lectures warning of a crisis of capitalism preceded the current disaster. In this event, Wolff discussed the fallout of the economic collapse and the ongoing struggle over who will bear the massive costs.

This event was hosted by The New School's Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) on March 30, 2011. Truthout was a co-sponsor of the event along with US Uncut and Pacifica's WBAI.

For more information about professor Wolff and his work, please visit his website.

Watch the video here, what the usual media has not reported. Mass movements across the planet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-6DLT9MHO4M

Opposition to Paying for Capitalism's Crime: A Global Movement (Video)

Saturday 16 April 2011

by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout

This event was hosted by The New School's Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) on March 30, 2011. Truthout was a co-sponsor of the event along with US Uncut and Pacifica's WBAI.

For more information about professor Wolff and his work, please visit his website.

This event was hosted by The New School's Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA) on March 30, 2011. Truthout was a co-sponsor of the event along with US Uncut and Pacifica's WBAI.

For more information about professor Wolff and his work, please visit his website.

Watch the video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-6DLT9MHO4M

Opposition to Paying for Capitalism's Crime: A Global Movement (Video)

Saturday 16 April 2011

by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout

Survival Of The Kindest - Social Scientists Show Kindness Is A Key To Species Success

2011-04-15T12:21:00.001-07:00

Social scientists build case for 'survival of the kindest'

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 08 December 2009
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/12/08_survival_of_kindest.shtml

BERKELEY — Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

(Photo illustration by Jonathan Payne)

In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it "survival of the kindest."

"Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others," said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. "Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct.”

Empathy in our genes

Keltner's team is looking into how the human capacity to care and cooperate is wired into particular regions of the brain and nervous system. One recent study found compelling evidence that many of us are genetically predisposed to be empathetic.

The study, led by UC Berkeley graduate student Laura Saslow and Sarina Rodrigues of Oregon State University, found that people with a particular variation of the oxytocin gene receptor are more adept at reading the emotional state of others, and get less stressed out under tense circumstances.

Informally known as the "cuddle hormone,” oxytocin is secreted into the bloodstream and the brain, where it promotes social interaction, nurturing and romantic love, among other functions.

"The tendency to be more empathetic may be influenced by a single gene,” Rodrigues said.

The more you give, the more respect you get

While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question some UC Berkeley researchers are asking is, "How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?"

(Photo illustration by Nick Stanger)

One answer, according to UC Berkeley social psychologist and sociologist Robb Willer is that the more generous we are, the more respect and influence we wield. In one recent study, Willer and his team gave participants each a modest amount of cash and directed them to play games of varying complexity that would benefit the "public good.” The results, published in the journal American Sociological Review, showed that participants who acted more generously received more gifts, respect and cooperation from their peers and wielded more influence over them.

"The findings suggest that anyone who acts only in his or her narrow self-interest will be shunned, disrespected, even hated,” Willer said. "But those who behave generously with others are held in high esteem by their peers and thus rise in status.”

"Given how much is to be gained through generosity, social scientists increasingly wonder less why people are ever generous and more why they are ever selfish,” he added.

Cultivating the greater good

Such results validate the findings of such "positive psychology” pioneers as Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whose research in the early 1990s shifted away from mental illness and dysfunction, delving instead into the mysteries of human resilience and optimism.

While much of the positive psychology being studied around the nation is focused on personal fulfillment and happiness, UC Berkeley researchers have narrowed their investigation into how it contributes to the greater societal good.

One outcome is the campus's Greater Good Science Center, a West Coast magnet for research on gratitude, compassion, altruism, awe and positive parenting, whose benefactors include the Metanexus Institute, Tom and Ruth Ann Hornaday and the Quality of Life Foundation.

Christine Carter, executive director of the Greater Good Science Center, is creator of the "Science for Raising Happy Kids” Web site, whose goal, among other things, is to assist in and promote the rearing of "emotionally literate” children. Carter translates rigorous research into practical parenting advice. She says many parents are turning away from materialistic or competitive activities, and rethinking what will bring their families true happiness and well-being.

"I've found that parents who start consciously cultivating gratitude and generosity in their children quickly see how much happier and more resilient their children become,” said Carter, author of "Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents” which will be in bookstores in February 2010. "What is often surprising to parents is how much happier they themselves also become."

The sympathetic touch

As for college-goers, UC Berkeley psychologist Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton has found that cross-racial and cross-ethnic friendships can improve the social and academic experience on campuses. In one set of findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he found that the cortisol levels of both white and Latino students dropped as they got to know each over a series of one-on-one get-togethers. Cortisol is a hormone triggered by stress and anxiety.

(Photo illustration by Eva Rousse)

Meanwhile, in their investigation of the neurobiological roots of positive emotions, Keltner and his team are zeroing in on the aforementioned oxytocin as well as the vagus nerve, a uniquely mammalian system that connects to all the body's organs and regulates heart rate and breathing.

Both the vagus nerve and oxytocin play a role in communicating and calming. In one UC Berkeley study, for example, two people separated by a barrier took turns trying to communicate emotions to one another by touching one other through a hole in the barrier. For the most part, participants were able to successfully communicate sympathy, love and gratitude and even assuage major anxiety.

Researchers were able to see from activity in the threat response region of the brain that many of the female participants grew anxious as they waited to be touched. However, as soon as they felt a sympathetic touch, the vagus nerve was activated and oxytocin was released, calming them immediately.

"Sympathy is indeed wired into our brains and bodies; and it spreads from one person to another through touch,” Keltner said.

The same goes for smaller mammals. UC Berkeley psychologist Darlene Francis and Michael Meaney, a professor of biological psychiatry and neurology at McGill University, found that rat pups whose mothers licked, groomed and generally nurtured them showed reduced levels of stress hormones, including cortisol, and had generally more robust immune systems.

Overall, these and other findings at UC Berkeley challenge the assumption that nice guys finish last, and instead support the hypothesis that humans, if adequately nurtured and supported, tend to err on the side of compassion.

“This new science of altruism and the physiological underpinnings of compassion is finally catching up with Darwin's observations nearly 130 years ago, that sympathy is our strongest instinct,” Keltner said.

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Mother Tiger & Pig 'Cubs' - How the rest of the world can get along, too

2011-04-05T14:29:00.001-07:00

Why can't the rest of the world get along??

April 5, 2011

http://www.garynull.com/home/why-cant-the-rest-of-the-world-get-along.html

In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth. The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate another mother's cub's, perhaps she would improve. After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species, will take on the care of a different species. The only 'orphans' that could be found quickly, were a litter of weanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger. Would they become cubs or pork chops?? Take a look...

Now, please tell me one more time........ Why can't the rest of the world get along??

SIGN THE: Declaration of Interdependence - Written By David Suzuki & Friends

2011-04-01T16:45:00.001-07:00

Declaration of Interdependence

Sign the Declaration

WATCH - The Declaration of Interdependence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeOU5vydSBY

SIGN - The Declaration of Interdependence
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/about/declaration/

The Declaration of Interdependence was written by David Suzuki and friends. David is a world leader. He received the Right Livelihood Award - alternative Nobel Prize - and many other prizes and recognition through out the world for his incredible work, with many others, nurturing a beautiful, better world for everyone - people and nature.

Declaration of Interdependence

This we know

We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.
And we share a common future, as yet untold.
We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.
The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.
Linked in that web, we are interconnected — using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life.
Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

This we believe

Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction, dammed the great rivers, torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.
Our science has brought pain as well as joy; our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.
We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin, and we now build a new politics of hope.
We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.
We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.
And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.
We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase.
So where knowledge is limited, we will remember all those who will walk after us, and err on the side of caution.

This we resolve

All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live.
At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.

Sign the Declaration of Interdependence

Maine town becomes first to declare food sovereignty

2011-04-01T12:28:00.001-07:00

Maine town becomes first to declare food sovereignty

Friday, March 11, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff write

http://www.naturalnews.com/031667_food_freedom_Maine.html

(NaturalNews) The town of Sedgwick, Maine, currently leads the pack as far as food sovereignty is concerned. Local residents recently voted unanimously at a town hall meeting to pass an ordinance that reinforces its citizens' God-given rights to "produce, process, sell, purchase, and consume local foods of their choosing," which includes even state- and federally-restricted foods like raw milk.

The declaration is one of the first of its kind to be passed in the US, and it is definitely not the last. Several other Maine towns -- including Penobscott, Brooksville, and Blue Hill -- all have similar ordinances up for vote in the coming weeks.

"Tears of joy welled in my eyes as my town voted to adopt this ordinance," said Mia Strong, a Sedgwick resident who frequents local farms. "I am so proud of my community. They made a stand for local food and our fundamental rights as citizens to choose that food."

In addition to simply declaring food sovereignty, the ordinance also declares it a crime for state and federal authorities to violate ordinance provisions in any way. The law specifically states that "[i]t shall be unlawful for any law or regulation adopted by the state or federal government to interfere with the rights recognized by this Ordinance." This includes, of course, any attempt to enforce the unconstitutional provisions of the S 510 the HR 2751 food tyranny bills that were recently passed (http://www.naturalnews.com/030789_F...).

And what about potential conflicts that may arise between farmer and patron? The two will agree to enter into private agreements with one another, apart from government interference, and settle any disputes that arise personally and civilly. It is the way things used to be done before Americans sacrificed their freedoms to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other federal agencies that now tell the public what they can and cannot eat.

In December, the state of Vermont drafted its own food sovereignty bill (http://www.naturalnews.com/030827_f...), and several others are considering similar bills as well.

To learn more about how to promote food sovereignty in your town, city, county, or state, visit the Tenth Amendment Center at:
http://www.naturalnews.com/030827_f...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031667_food_freedom_Maine.html#ixzz1IIk8V8xc

BWN - Health v5

2011-03-31T13:28:00.001-07:00

Stretching: The Truth

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

November 2, 2008

Phys Ed

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/sports/playmagazine/112pewarm.html
Also see link's video

WHEN DUANE KNUDSON, a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Chico, looks around campus at athletes warming up before practice, he sees one dangerous mistake after another. “They’re stretching, touching their toes. . . . ” He sighs. “It’s discouraging.”

If you’re like most of us, you were taught the importance of warm-up exercises back in grade school, and you’ve likely continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg’s muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements.

“There is a neuromuscular inhibitory response to static stretching,” says Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. The straining muscle becomes less responsive and stays weakened for up to 30 minutes after stretching, which is not how an athlete wants to begin a workout.

THE RIGHT WARM-UP should do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase the range of motion of various joints, and literally warm up the body. When you’re at rest, there’s less blood flow to muscles and tendons, and they stiffen. “You need to make tissues and tendons compliant before beginning exercise,” Knudson says.

A well-designed warm-up starts by increasing body heat and blood flow. Warm muscles and dilated blood vessels pull oxygen from the bloodstream more efficiently and use stored muscle fuel more effectively. They also withstand loads better. One significant if gruesome study found that the leg-muscle tissue of laboratory rabbits could be stretched farther before ripping if it had been electronically stimulated — that is, warmed up.

To raise the body’s temperature, a warm-up must begin with aerobic activity, usually light jogging. Most coaches and athletes have known this for years. That’s why tennis players run around the court four or five times before a match and marathoners stride in front of the starting line. But many athletes do this portion of their warm-up too intensely or too early. A 2002 study of collegiate volleyball players found that those who’d warmed up and then sat on the bench for 30 minutes had lower backs that were stiffer than they had been before the warm-up. And a number of recent studies have demonstrated that an overly vigorous aerobic warm-up simply makes you tired. Most experts advise starting your warm-up jog at about 40 percent of your maximum heart rate (a very easy pace) and progressing to about 60 percent. The aerobic warm-up should take only 5 to 10 minutes, with a 5-minute recovery. (Sprinters require longer warm-ups, because the loads exerted on their muscles are so extreme.) Then it’s time for the most important and unorthodox part of a proper warm-up regimen, the Spider-Man and its counterparts.

“TOWARDS THE end of my playing career, in about 2000, I started seeing some of the other guys out on the court doing these strange things before a match and thinking, What in the world is that?” says Mark Merklein, 36, once a highly ranked tennis player and now a national coach for the United States Tennis Association. The players were lunging, kicking and occasionally skittering, spider-like, along the sidelines. They were early adopters of a new approach to stretching.

While static stretching is still almost universally practiced among amateur athletes — watch your child’s soccer team next weekend — it doesn’t improve the muscles’ ability to perform with more power, physiologists now agree. “You may feel as if you’re able to stretch farther after holding a stretch for 30 seconds,” McHugh says, “so you think you’ve increased that muscle’s readiness.” But typically you’ve increased only your mental tolerance for the discomfort of the stretch. The muscle is actually weaker.

Stretching muscles while moving, on the other hand, a technique known as dynamic stretching or dynamic warm-ups, increases power, flexibility and range of motion. Muscles in motion don’t experience that insidious inhibitory response. They instead get what McHugh calls “an excitatory message” to perform.

Dynamic stretching is at its most effective when it’s relatively sports specific. “You need range-of-motion exercises that activate all of the joints and connective tissue that will be needed for the task ahead,” says Terrence Mahon, a coach with Team Running USA, home to the Olympic marathoners Ryan Hall and Deena Kastor. For runners, an ideal warm-up might include squats, lunges and “form drills” like kicking your buttocks with your heels. Athletes who need to move rapidly in different directions, like soccer, tennis or basketball players, should do dynamic stretches that involve many parts of the body. “Spider-Man” is a particularly good drill: drop onto all fours and crawl the width of the court, as if you were climbing a wall. (For other dynamic stretches, see the sidebar below.)

Even golfers, notoriously nonchalant about warming up (a recent survey of 304 recreational golfers found that two-thirds seldom or never bother), would benefit from exerting themselves a bit before teeing off. In one 2004 study, golfers who did dynamic warm- up exercises and practice swings increased their clubhead speed and were projected to have dropped their handicaps by seven strokes over seven weeks.

Controversy remains about the extent to which dynamic warm-ups prevent injury. But studies have been increasingly clear that static stretching alone before exercise does little or nothing to help. The largest study has been done on military recruits; results showed that an almost equal number of subjects developed lower-limb injuries (shin splints, stress fractures, etc.), regardless of whether they had performed static stretches before training sessions. A major study published earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, on the other hand, found that knee injuries were cut nearly in half among female collegiate soccer players who followed a warm-up program that included both dynamic warm-up exercises and static stretching. (For a sample routine, visit www.aclprevent.com/pepprogram.htm.) And in golf, new research by Andrea Fradkin, an assistant professor of exercise science at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, suggests that those who warm up are nine times less likely to be injured.

“It was eye-opening,” says Fradkin, formerly a feckless golfer herself. “I used to not really warm up. I do now.”

You’re Getting Warmer: The Best Dynamic Stretches

These exercises- as taught by the United States Tennis Association’s player-development program – are good for many athletes, even golfers. Do them immediately after your aerobic warm-up and as soon as possible before your workout.

STRAIGHT-LEG MARCH

(for the hamstrings and gluteus muscles)

Kick one leg straight out in front of you, with your toes flexed toward the sky. Reach your opposite arm to the upturned toes. Drop the leg and repeat with the opposite limbs. Continue the sequence for at least six or seven repetitions.

SCORPION

(for the lower back, hip flexors and gluteus muscles)

Lie on your stomach, with your arms outstretched and your feet flexed so that only your toes are touching the ground. Kick your right foot toward your left arm, then kick your leftfoot toward your right arm. Since this is an advanced exercise, begin slowly, and repeat up to 12 times.

HANDWALKS

(for the shoulders, core muscles, and hamstrings)

Stand straight, with your legs together. Bend over until both hands are flat on the ground. “Walk” with your hands forward until your back is almost extended. Keeping your legs straight, inch your feet toward your hands, then walk your hands forward again. Repeat five or six times. G.R.

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Pilger - A Word We Dare Not Speak

2011-03-29T05:55:00.001-07:00

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks.

Something has changed that cannot be unchanged.

The enemy has a name now.
---

Behind the Arab revolt is a word we dare not speak
24 February 2011
John Pilger

http://www.johnpilger.com/articles/behind-the-arab-revolt-is-a-word-we-dare-not-speak

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I interviewed Ray McGovern, one of an elite group of CIA officers who prepared the President’s daily intelligence brief. McGovern was at the apex of the “national security” monolith that is American power and had retired with presidential plaudits. On the eve of the invasion, he and 45 other senior officers of the CIA and other intelligence agencies wrote to President George W. Bush that the “drumbeat for war” was based not on intelligence, but lies.

“It was 95 per cent charade,” McGovern told me.

“How did they get away with it?”

“The press allowed the crazies to get away with it.”

“Who are the crazies?”

“The people running the [Bush] administration have a set of beliefs a lot like those expressed in Mein Kampf... these are the same people who were referred to in the circles in which I moved, at the top, as ‘the crazies’.”

I said, “Norman Mailer has written that that he believes America has entered a pre-fascist state. What’s your view of that?”

“Well... I hope he’s right, because there are others saying we are already in a fascist mode.”

On 22 January, Ray McGovern emailed me to express his disgust at the Obama administration’s barbaric treatment of the alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning and its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. “Way back when George and Tony decided it might be fun to attack Iraq,” he wrote, “I said something to the effect that fascism had already begun here. I have to admit I did not think it would get this bad this quickly.”

On 16 February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a speech at George Washington University in which she condemned governments that arrested protestors and crushed free expression. She lauded the liberating power of the internet while failing to mention that her government was planning to close down those parts of the internet that encouraged dissent and truth-telling. It was a speech of spectacular hypocrisy, and Ray McGovern was in the audience. Outraged, he rose from his chair and silently turned his back on Clinton. He was immediately seized by police and a security goon and beaten to the floor, dragged out and thrown into jail, bleeding. He has sent me photographs of his injuries. He is 71. During the assault, which was clearly visible to Clinton, she did not pause in her remarks.

Fascism is a difficult word, because it comes with an iconography that touches the Nazi nerve and is abused as propaganda against America’s official enemies and to promote the West’s foreign adventures with a moral vocabulary written in the struggle against Hitler. And yet fascism and imperialism are twins. In the aftermath of world war two, those in the imperial states who had made respectable the racial and cultural superiority of “western civilisation”, found that Hitler and fascism had claimed the same, employing strikingly similar methods. Thereafter, the very notion of American imperialism was swept from the textbooks and popular culture of an imperial nation forged on the genocidal conquest of its native people. And a war on social justice and democracy became “US foreign policy”.

As the Washington historian William Blum has documented, since 1945, the US has destroyed or subverted more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and used mass murderers like Suharto, Mobutu and Pinochet to dominate by proxy. In the Middle East, every dictatorship and pseudo-monarchy has been sustained by America. In “Operation Cyclone”, the CIA and MI6 secretly fostered and bank-rolled Islamic extremism. The object was to smash or deter nationalism and democracy. The victims of this western state terrorism have been mostly Muslims. The courageous people gunned down last week in Bahrain and Libya, the latter a “priority UK market”, according to Britain’s official arms “procurers”, join those children blown to bits in Gaza by the latest American F-16 aircraft.

The revolt in the Arab world is not merely against a resident dictator but a worldwide economic tyranny designed by the US Treasury and imposed by the US Agency for International Development, the IMF and World Bank, which have ensured that rich countries like Egypt are reduced to vast sweatshops, with half the population earning less than $2 a day. The people’s triumph in Cairo was the first blow against what Benito Mussolini called corporatism, a word that appears in his definition of fascism.

How did such extremism take hold in the liberal West? “It is necessary to destroy hope, idealism, solidarity, and concern for the poor and oppressed,” observed Noam Chomsky a generation ago, “[and] to replace these dangerous feelings with self-centred egoism, a pervasive cynicism that holds that [an order of] inequities and oppression is the best that can be achieved. In fact, a great international propaganda campaign is under way to convince people – particularly young people – that this not only is what they should feel but that it’s what they do feel.”

Like the European revolutions of 1848 and the uprising against Stalinism in 1989, the Arab revolt has rejected fear. An insurrection of suppressed ideas, hope and solidarity has begun. In the United States, where 45 per cent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, a billion dollars a year, mass protests against cuts in services and jobs have spread to heartland states like Wisconsin. In Britain, the fastest-growing modern protest movement, UK Uncut, is about to take direct action against tax avoiders and rapacious banks. Something has changed that cannot be unchanged. The enemy has a name now.

US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl

2011-03-10T11:48:00.001-08:00

"The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm," says David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service, part of the USDA. "That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...)

prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

run out of water for its farms.
harbinger of a potential Dust Bowl unseen in America since the Great Depression.

'It's the decline in the water level,' she says. 'In the 1950s a lot of wells were drilled, and the water went down. Now you can't farm the land.'

It does not replenish.

But Texas, true to its self-conscious style of 'rugged individualism', has no such legal controls.
'right to capture'.

'But with a bit of luck, we get eight to 10 inches a year, and we have learnt to capture it. I aim for half-and-half, half rainfall and half aquifer.' He can now grow crops using five acre-inches a year, rather than acre-feet. '

The Texas oil billionaire and corporate raider T Boone Pickens is after their water.

buying up Panhandle land with water rights over the Ogallala. He is now the largest individual water owner in America, with rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a year, at least until the land goes dry. That is 65 billion gallons a year, or, to put it another way, 124,000 gallons a minute. T

Pickens plans to pipe it 250 miles to Dallas

defied the attempts of their fellow farmers to protect water supplies for the benefit of all.

'In Kansas, the state owns the water – not so in Texas,' he says.
'We own it, and we don't see why we should give up our right to capture

To a man they loathe Pickens, while defending his 'right to capture'.

'We are drying up. People don't learn from history, and if we keep breaking the ground and run out of water, it'll happen again.'

He misses the life. 'I used to go out on the land before dawn
+++

US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl

For years the Ogallala Aquifer, the world’s largest underground body of fresh water, has irrigated thousands of square miles of American farmland. Now it is running dry

Image 1 of 5

The town of Happy, Texas, sits on top of the rapidly depleting Ogallala Aquifer. Its population is dwindling by 10 per cent a year. Photo: Misty Keasler

By Charles Laurence 7:00AM GMT 07 Mar 2011

162 Comments

There is not much to be happy about these days in Happy, Texas. Main Street is shuttered but for the Happy National Bank, slowly but inexorably disappearing into a High Plains wind that turns all to dust. The old Picture House, the cinema, has closed. Tumbleweed rolls into the still corners behind the grain elevators, soaring prairie cathedrals that spoke of prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

Happy's problem is that it has run out of water for its farms. Its population, dropping 10 per cent a year, is down to 595. The name, which brings a smile for miles around and plays in faded paint on the fronts of every shuttered business – Happy Grain Inc, Happy Game Room – has become irony tinged with bitterness. It goes back to the cowboy days of the 19th century. A cattle drive north through the Texas Panhandle to the rail heads beyond had been running out of water, steers dying on the hoof, when its cowboys stumbled on a watering hole. They named the spot Happy Draw, for the water. Now Happy is the harbinger of a potential Dust Bowl unseen in America since the Great Depression.

'It was a booming town when I grew up,' Judy Shipman, who manages the bank, says. 'We had three restaurants, a grocery, a plumber, an electrician, a building contractor, a doctor. We had so much fun, growing up.' Like all the townsfolk, she knows why the fun has gone. 'It's the decline in the water level,' she says. 'In the 1950s a lot of wells were drilled, and the water went down. Now you can't farm the land.'

Those wells were drilled into a geological phenomenon called the Ogallala Aquifer. It is an underground lake of pristine water formed between two and six million years ago, in the Pliocene age, when the tectonic shifts that pushed the Rocky Mountains skywards were still active. The water was trapped below the new surface crust that would become the semi-arid soil of the Plains, dry and dusty. It stretches all the way down the eastern slope of the Rockies from the badlands of South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle. It does not replenish.

Happy is the canary in the coalmine because the Ogallala is deepest in the north, as much as 300ft in the more fertile country of Nebraska and Kansas. In the south, through the panhandle and over the border to New Mexico, it is 50-100ft. And around Happy, 75 miles south of Amarillo, it is now 0-50ft. The farms have been handed over to the government's Conservation Reserve Programme (CRP) to lie fallow in exchange for grants: farmers' welfare, although they hate to think of it like that.

'Water mining' is now a prime culprit for raising sea levels
09 Oct 2010
Investors tap into water
02 Apr 2010

The first ranchers, and the Plains Indians before them, knew of water below the ground from the watering holes that sustained buffalo and then cattle far from any river. The white man learnt to drill, leaving primitive windmills on top of wooden derricks silhouetted against Wild West horizons.

But it was only in the 1940s, after the Dust Bowl (the result of a severe drought and excessive farming in the early 1930s), that the US Geological Survey worked out that the watering holes were clues to the Ogallala, now believed to be the world's largest body of fresh water. They were about to repeat the dreams of man from the days of Ancient Egypt and Judea to turn the desert green, only without the Nile or Jordan. With new technology the wells could reach the deepest water, and from the early 1950s the boom was on. Some of the descendants of Dust Bowl survivors became millionaire landowners.

'Since then,' says David Brauer of the US Agriculture Department agency, the Ogallala Research Service, 'we have drained enough water to half-fill Lake Erie of the Great Lakes.' Billions upon billions of gallons – or, as they prefer to measure it, acre-feet of water, each one equivalent to a football field flooded a foot deep – have been pumped. 'The problem,' he goes on, 'is that in a brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down from an average of 240ft to about 80.'

Brauer's agency was set up in direct response to the Dust Bowl, with the brief of finding ways to make sure that the devastation never happens again. If it does, the impact on the world's food supply will be far greater. The irrigated Plains grow 20 per cent of American grain and corn (maize), and America's 'industrial' agriculture dominates international markets. A collapse of those markets would lead to starvation in Africa and anywhere else where a meal depends on cheap American exports. 'The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm,' Brauer says. 'That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do.'

Estimates vary, but with careful conservation, less wasteful irrigation and seeds for corn, cotton, wheat and sorghum genetically engineered for drought conditions, farming may yet go on for 60 years. That would be over the deepest stratum of the Ogallala. But the husbanding of water, soil, minerals or anything else has never been the Texan way, and without it the dust will start blowing in as few as 10 years.

Water – not oil – has always been the most valuable resource in the West. Wars have been fought over it, feuds maintained, and fortunes won or lost. Apart from the Ogallala, the main source remains the Colorado River, flowing west from the Rockies, its annual bounty of snow melt providing the drinking water for Las Vegas, irrigation for California's Central Valley, and the swimming-pools of Los Angeles. No one is surprised that the mighty Colorado now runs dry before it reaches the Pacific, nor that climate change, with falling rain and snow levels, spells potential disaster for the Sunshine States. There are at least public controls over most of this water, even if it is actually owned by corporations and very rich people with 'water rights'.

But Texas, true to its self-conscious style of 'rugged individualism', has no such legal controls. It maintains its Wild West-era laws of 'right to capture'. This means that if you have water under your land, or in a river running through it, you can take and use as much of it as you like. You can water the corn or the cows, or you can make a buck by selling it to the nearest thirsty suburb. If you want to drain your land into desert, you may.

With the American 'can-do' faith in technology, Brauer's own hopes are for the 60-odd years of reduced but viable farming. 'We don't want it to be a bust,' he says. 'We have to be optimistic.'

In Happy, that sounds more like wishful thinking. The early December sun sinks towards the winter solstice at a few minutes after six, leaving Main and its crossroads with the railway tracks in darkness but for a few street lights. A miniature suburban-style housing grid stretches between Main and the high school on the eastern edge of town. The football team is the Happy Cowboys, their cheerleaders the Happy Cowgirls. Old pick-up trucks in the car-park denote an away match, their drivers piled into yellow school buses for the trip. Most of the houses are still lived in, valued at about half the Texas average. Some are dilapidated, their gardens planted with rusting detritus, others spruce with the Stars and Stripes flapping in the breeze. Nowadays, the working population drives an hour or so north or south to small cities where they find employment.

The temperature drops below freezing. Kay Horner sits in My Happy Place, her diner on Highway 87, hoping for traffic and customers. She has moved back from Arkansas, snapping-up a Main Street store for only $10,000 to turn into her home. 'There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's 1,000,' she says. 'Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl.'

Less than 20 miles south, towards Lubbock, the next town down Interstate 27, Barry Evans is still farming. His 2,200 acres came from his great-uncle Freeman, who watched it turn to dust in the 1930s. Evans's father, in his eighties, still works the farm next door. Evans has sunk new wells to make up supply as old ones dry from producing 1,000 gallons a minute to 100, but the aquifer is deeper here and they have enough Ogallala water left to pump and make a profit. They want to make it last, their eyes fixed on the future so that Barry's son, Eric, can take over for a fourth generation. He is in his last year at high school and is raising four pigs of his own for the 4H (young farmers) competition at the County Fair. It will not be easy, but at 48 Evans has taken himself to the cutting edge of farm technique and technology. If there is a future for Ogallala farming, it depends on men such as Evans.

'You have to see this as a business like any other,' he says. 'To earn a living, to stay on the land, you have to maintain the margin between cost and product value. Our water level is 10 per cent of what it was 30 years ago, and we have to make up for that by technique. That means looking for more yield from less water.'

Evans went to the local university for an agriculture degree, and stayed on to complete half a master's in business. He does not own a cowboy hat, and pulls on a winter coat bearing the logo of a seed company, a salesman's gift, as he sets out to tour his 'sections', fields of a square mile each. At ground level the rows look faintly curved, but from the air you can see that the fields are circles, and from passenger jets at 30,000ft they look like the crop circles of Salisbury Plain. They are ugly and alien on the wide-open land, but they have become the landscape of Ogallala agriculture because they are cut to fit the sweep of the enormous arm of a pivot irrigator, turning like the hand of a clock, a hand a half a mile long. They cost $180,000 each.

Evans stops by a well. There is no derrick, only a concrete block sprouting heavy pipes, because nowadays the pump is at the bottom of the well. Inside a steel box is a computer: it controls the pivoting arm to lay down an average of an inch in eight days. Every drop counts. On many farms you can see the effects of drought from the air as a quarter or a third of the land is left dry to burn brown in the sun. 'During the 90s, I really thought it would never rain again,' Evans says. 'But with a bit of luck, we get eight to 10 inches a year, and we have learnt to capture it. I aim for half-and-half, half rainfall and half aquifer.' He can now grow crops using five acre-inches a year, rather than acre-feet. 'That's a big difference,' he says.

He strides into the field along the line of the pivot arm, 12ft over his head. Every few yards a spray nozzle dangles on a hose, low enough to spray below the canopy of the crops. That is one way to minimize waste through evaporation. Next, he stoops to the soil to show the flattened stubble of last year's crop, and of the year's before that. He no longer ploughs – nothing dries the surface to turn the soil to dust like ploughing. Instead, the old stalks hold down the soil, keep the moisture in, and rot down to nutrients. The seeds, themselves 'engineered', are dropped below the surface by a machine that opens a narrow channel in front of the dispenser, and closes it behind them.

Then there is the choice of crops. Evans has switched from corn, wheat and cattle to cotton and sorghum, which makes oil and ethanol for fuel, alternating them around his circular fields. They use less water, and he has got rid of the cattle altogether. 'I don't want to drill more wells,' he says. 'Why would I want to own a desert?'

At the Ogallala Research Service's experimental farm just west of Amarillo, soil scientist Steve Evett nods his approval and says, 'The smart, educated farmer survives: the ones that fall behind do not.' He is out in his half-sized 'pivot' field, showing off the next generation of irrigation systems. This one is fully automated and, with a bit of luck, may save another drop or two. It starts with a new nozzle, a 'sock', which drips the water right on to the ground by each root. Between each dangling pipe is a cable with a sensor at one end, and a computer relay at the other. It measures the amount of moisture in the canopy, and takes a light-spectrum scan of each plant to determine its health, just as the gardener judges the colour of his leaves. This information goes back to the computer mounted at the well-head for even finer metering.

In another field, there is what might become the last resort: a system buried underground, watering only individual roots, with evaporation limited to any that might reach the surface. 'We are already seeing much less water used,' Evett says, 'and there is going to be less and less to use. Things will get harder and harder, but we can use technology to offset the drying for as long as we can.'

All may come to nought in the face of a threat that has nothing to do with corn or beef, but everything to do with the American devotion to making money at any cost. The Texas oil billionaire and corporate raider T Boone Pickens is after their water. He is proving to be the ultimate test of their free market gospel of the 'right to capture'.

Ten years ago Pickens concluded that the prophets of climate-change may well be right, and if they were, that water would become more valuable than the oil that had made his fortune. He formed a company called Mesa Water, and began buying up Panhandle land with water rights over the Ogallala. He is now the largest individual water owner in America, with rights over enough of the aquifer to drain an estimated 200,000 acre-feet a year, at least until the land goes dry. That is 65 billion gallons a year, or, to put it another way, 124,000 gallons a minute. The plan? Ninety-five per cent of Ogallala water is now used for agriculture, but Pickens plans to pipe it 250 miles to Dallas, expected to triple in size in 30 years, with a demand for water far exceeding supply. Pickens is making the hottest of climate-change bets: that water's value will rocket as it runs dry. One man's thirst is another man's fortune. Irrigation farming would simply follow gold mining, open-range ranching and oil drilling in the traditional cycle of boom and bust. 'There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it,' Pickens has said. 'That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing.'

'Obviously it would be a disaster for the Panhandle,' Steve Walthour, manager of the North Plains Groundwater Conservation District, says. 'But if there are no limits, he can take all he wants. That's the law of capture.'

Texas conservatives, at the core of America's faith-and-business culture, root for Pickens. Brent Connett, a policy analyst for the Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute, pushes the view that trading farming for selling water is a 'right' upheld by 100 years of Texan law, and can only bring new prosperity. 'The water business, if allowed to bloom,' he believes, 'can be the advent of another multi-billion-dollar business that will tremendously benefit all Texans, especially those who hold the rights to the water in the Panhandle.'

Connett does not offer a count of winners versus losers. But a group of landowners in the far north of the Panhandle could certainly be winners. Taking advantage of another quirk of Texas law, they have voted against joining Walthour's Conservation District. That was their democratic right even as it defied the attempts of their fellow farmers to protect water supplies for the benefit of all. The other Ogallala states all have some form of government controls metering water use. Texas has the Conservation Districts instead, with the local farmers voting their own restrictions. The problem is that these are voluntary. 'The idea,' Walthour says, 'is to balance individual water rights with the common interest. It's the best thing to do. Otherwise the biggest pump wins – and everyone goes dry.'

Will Allen, among the 'opt-out' owners with a 'spread' close to the Oklahoma border, does not see it that way. 'In Kansas, the state owns the water – not so in Texas,' he says. 'We own it, and we don't see why we should give up our right to capture. We would be giving away property that belongs to us.' His family settled here in 1905 and he holds to their belief that the aquifer is less of a lake than a series of 'pockets', private to the land immediately above. Only the prospect of Pickens draining the water from underneath him seems to dent Allen's stand-alone verities. Would he chase him out of town? He chuckles, a little uncertainly. 'Well, I wouldn't want him as a neighbour,' he says. 'But if he takes out water he owns, that is his right.'

There is an air of fatality hanging over the farmers of the Panhandle. At the Elk Junction Restaurant in Stratford, a crossroads village 70 miles north of Happy at the heart of the 'opt-out' district, a group of half a dozen farmers has gathered to gossip over pies and coffee. Most are retired, or planning to quit, handing over to their sons if they want the land. Not all do. These men are mostly losing the struggle for water and the slender margins of profit that can keep them on the land. They have worked long and hard through often brutal weather, farming vast tracts with a couple of sons until they quit for college or city jobs. The land they have hung on to is worth a pension, as long as there is still some water for irrigation, but their real reward is their pride. To a man they loathe Pickens, while defending his 'right to capture'. This is Texas, and they are Texan.

The water boards would like to stop him but they know that state government would not dare challenge individual rights to ownership. Their only real chance is to persuade the county authorities to stall on 'zoning' permits when he starts to build his pipeline, and that is an outside chance.

'The heart of the Dust Bowl was here, you know,' says Wayne Plunk, whose great-great-grandfather came over from Germany. He is big and round, strong as an ox in his day, but now he looks a good 10 years older than his 69 years. 'When I was six I was asking my dad for a $1 umbrella against the sun for the tractor I drove all day. He said no, and bought me a 25-cent hat instead.' He has not stopped working since. He went to college to train as a teacher, and for 25 years taught at local schools while farming in the remaining hours. 'We are drying up. People don't learn from history, and if we keep breaking the ground and run out of water, it'll happen again.'

Plunk believes that one way or the other, farming the High Plains will have to end. Like the farmers of Happy, he has handed his land to the CRP to let it return to the Plains that nature intended. He misses the life. 'I used to go out on the land before dawn when I worked at school,' he says, 'and I would always plough to the east. I ploughed into the rising sun, and I knew there was a God.' He pushes back his cap, and stares into the distance.
===

(NaturalNews) It's the largest underground freshwater supply in the world, stretching from South Dakota all the way to Texas. It's underneath most of Nebraska's farmlands, and it provides crucial water resources for farming in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and even New Mexico. It's called the Ogallala Aquifer, and it is being pumped dry.

See the map of this aquifer here: http://www.naturalnews.com/images/O...

Without the Ogallala Aquifer, America's heartland food production collapses. No water means no irrigation for the corn, wheat, alfalfa and other crops grown across these states to feed people and animals. And each year, the Ogallala Aquifer drops another few inches as it is literally being sucked dry by the tens of thousands of agricultural wells that tap into it across the heartland of America.

This problem with all this is that the Ogallala Aquifer isn't being recharged in any significant way from rainfall or rivers. This is so-called "fossil water" because once you use it, it's gone. And it's disappearing now faster than ever.

In some regions along the aquifer, the water level has dropped so far that it has effectively disappeared -- places like Happy, Texas, where a once-booming agricultural town has collapsed to a population of just 595. All the wells drilled there in the 1950's tapped into the Ogallala Aquifer and seemed to provide abundant water at the time. But today the wells have all run dry.

Happy, Texas has become a place of despair. Dead cattle. Wilted crops. Once-moist soils turned to dust. And Happy is just the beginning of this story because this same agricultural tragedy will be repeated across Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas and parts of Colorado in the next few decades. That's a hydrologic fact. Water doesn't magically reappear in the Ogallala. Once it's used up, it's gone.

"There used to be 50,000 head of cattle, now there's 1,000," says Kay Horner in a Telegraph report (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...). "Grazed them on wheat, but the feed lots took all the water so we can't grow wheat. Now the feed lots can't get local steers so they bring in cheap unwanted milking calves from California and turn them into burger if they can't make them veal. It doesn't make much sense. We're heading back to the Dust Bowl."

The end of cheap food in America?

It's a sobering thought, really: That "America's breadbasket" is on a collision course with the inevitable. A large percentage of the food produced in the United States is, of course, grown on farmlands irrigated from the Ogallala. For hundreds of years, it has been a source of "cheap water," making farming economically feasible and keeping food prices down. Combined with the available of cheap fossil fuels over the last century (necessary to drive the tractors that work the fields), food production has skyrocketed in North America. This has led to a population explosion, too. Where food is cheap and plentiful, populations readily expand.

It only follows that when food becomes scarce or expensive (putting it out of reach of average income earners), populations will fall. There's only so much food to go around, after all. And after the Ogallala runs dry, America's food production will plummet. Starvation will become the new American landscape for those who cannot afford the sky-high prices for food.

Aquifer depletion is a global problem

It's not a problem that's unique to America, by the way. The very same problem is facing India, where fossil water is already running dry in many parts of the country. It's the same story in China, too, where water conservation has never been a top priority. Even the Middle East is facing its own water crisis (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...). This has caused food prices to skyrocket, leading directly to the civil unrest, the riots and even the revolutions we've seen taking place there over the last few months.

The problem is called aquifer depletion (http://www.eoearth.org/article/Aqui...), and it's a problem that spans the globe. It means that today's cheap, easy food -- grown on cheap fossil water -- simply isn't sustainable. Once that water is gone, the croplands that depend on it dry up. Following that, erosion kicks in, and the winds blow away the dry soils in a "Dust Bowl" type of scenario.

A few years after that, what was once a thriving agricultural operation is transformed into a dry, soilless death pit where nothing lives.

"The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm," says David Brauer of the Ogallala Research Service, part of the USDA. "That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do." (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...)

Such is the legacy of conventional agriculture, which is based almost entirely on non-sustainable practices. Its insane reliance on fossil water, petroleum fertilizers, toxic pesticides and GMOs will only lead our world to agricultural disaster.

Be prepared and be safe

I want all NaturalNews readers to be prepared, informed and safe when facing our uncertain future. We know that trouble is stirring around the world, and much of it is either caused by or will lead to food shortages.

The GMO companies, of course, will exploit this situation to their advantage, claiming that only GMOs can grow enough food to feed the world. This is a lie. GMOs and patented seeds only enslave the world population and lead to great social injustice. The days of food slavery are fast approaching for those who do not have the means to grow at least a portion of their own food.

As part of our effort to help people become more self-reliant -- with greater food security -- throughout 2011 and 2012 I plan to bring you more articles, videos and webcast events that focus on home food production, self-reliance, family preparedness and sustainable living. Recently we announced a live webcast event on financial preparedness but the available seats at that event sold out in a matter of days (http://www.naturalnews.com/Economic...).

Based on the huge demand for this event, we have decided to roll out a second preparedness event in April, focused on food preparedness and security. Watch for an announcement on that soon.

In the mean time, I am personally working on growing more of my own food and will be creating a new series of videos and articles based on some of what I learn along the way. From living in South America and producing quite a large amount of food there, I have a fair amount of experience on home food production, but of course there's always more to learn, right?

My gut feeling on all this is that learning to grow and store some portion of your own food is going to become a crucial survival skill over the next few years. And that means understanding water, soil, open-pollinated seeds, organic fertilizers, soil probiotics, insect pollination, growing with the seasons, sprouting, food harvesting, food drying, canning, storage and much more. It's a whole set of skills that have faded away in America in just two generations, leaving very few people who now know how to live off their own land.

What's becoming increasingly obvious from events such as the drying up of aquifers is that home food production is going to become a critical survival skill. I want NaturalNews readers to know and practice these skills as much as possible so that you can experience the comforts (and freedoms!) of genuine food security.

Watch for more stories about preparedness, home food production and self-reliant living here on NaturalNews.

Sources for this story include:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/83...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031658_aquifer_depletion_Ogallala.html#ixzz1GDrCPcxw

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ODFL - One Dollar For Life - Projects For A Better World For Everyone

2011-03-09T10:59:00.001-08:00

What is ODFL? - Download a printable PDF version of this page.

What is ODFL?
http://www.odfl.org/staticpages/index.php/What_is_ODFL

ODFL is a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation founded to address third world poverty while empowering American teenagers to improve their world. It does this by collecting just one dollar from each of millions of US high school students and then channeling those funds into small-scale infrastructure projects in developing world countries.

ODFL works with qualified Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) to fund and implement such projects as schools, water wells, irrigation systems, sanitary waste disposal, vaccinations, and other simple, low cost projects. These projects have the potential to dramatically improve the capacity for self-sustenance — or even of life itself — for tens of millions of people.

ODFL was founded in 2006 at Los Altos High School in Los Altos, CA. It is operated by students with the help of teachers in Los Altos, Mt. View, and Bakersfield, CA.

How Does ODFL Work?

ODFL helps US high schools manage fund-raisers, aggregate their monies, identify qualified NGOs and worthy projects, and oversee the projects’ implementation in developing countries. Conceptually, ODFL’s operation looks like this:

ODFL maintains the highest of standards for both its NGO partners and the projects it funds. It ensures that monies are properly spent and enables students to monitor the way their projects improve lives of thousands of people.

The nexus connecting U.S. students and developing world villages is a web site built with industry standard hardware and software. The site provides training tools to help schools operate fund-raisers, offers profiles of qualified NGOs, and presents case studies of successful projects. It brings together millions of people from the US and the developing world to create a singular humanity working to reduce human suffering.

The Need in the Developing World

One billion people live on less than $1 per day. Three billion people — almost half of humanity — live on less than $2 per day. Three million children die every year of dehydration and the pill to cure it costs $.10. Five million people die of malaria and the pill to fix it costs $.25. These and myriad other problems consign these billions of people — and their children — to permanent destitution. Unless they’re addressed, these problems will only get worse. This need not be.

The Need in America

Ironically, American high school students have needs as well. They are hungry to find a purpose larger than themselves. They have an impulse for compassion. And they have a longing for self-efficacy. ODFL allows tens of millions of American students to connect to others through altruism and civic engagement, and to demonstrate a sense of self-efficacy in their lives. It allows them to directly improve their own world while making themselves into “bigger” people.

The Solution

Small Scale Projects

Clean drinking water. Basic vaccinations. Reading materials. Often, the smallest thing stands between destitution and self-sufficiency. Such things cost much less in developing countries than they do in the U.S., allowing small contributions to make such a large impact. It is exactly such low-cost-high-impact projects that allow ODFL to help improve living conditions and the potential for growth in developing world countries.

Small Grain Fundraising

ODFL fundraising is based on a very fine-grained contribution model: only $1 from each donor. The size makes it virtually impossible for any person to not want to participate. Yet it is precisely when all of these minute donations are added together that such small donations become so powerful. ODFL has built a “Fundraiser in a Box” to help U.S. schools organize and carry out successful fundraisers. The process is magical for students and teachers alike!

Successes and Visions

In its first full year of operation, ODFL:

Built a school in Kenya for 45 students who had been studying in a horse barn

Set 452 bicycles to Africa, our “Wheels of Wonder” used bicycle collection drive

Bought desks for 60 students at a primary school in Malawi

Raised $3,000 for victims of the China earthquake

Provided milk cows for 120 orphans in Kenya, feeding them protein for 8 years

Donated 4,000 pounds of food to the Bay Area Second Harvest Food Bank

Built a 3-room school in Nepal for 84 students with no school at all

These are the kind of low-cost, high impact projects that ODFL undertakes, helping both donors and recipients, both here and abroad. Bigger people. Better world. That is our mission. Please join us!

More about ODFL successes around the world.

ODFL's Vision, Philosophy & Mission

http://www.odfl.org/index.php?topic=fb

The Essential ODFL Fundraising Kit
& Supplemental Resources

The Overall Process

Stages and Tools of a Successful Fundraiser

If you want to download all documents and media below as one 173 MB .zip file, click here.

1. Organize

Document/Instruction	Purpose
Fundraiser Checklist	Essential checklist. Print this out to manage all facets of the drive.
Tasks, Leader, and Teams	Checklist to delegate tasks, leaders, and teams. Print this out and keep with the Fundraiser Checklist.
Fundraiser Approval Form	MUST be returned before beginning
Order Boxes from ODFL	One for each classroom. Order online. You MUST also submit your Fundraiser ApprovalForm.
Order Tri-folds from ODFL	One for each teacher. Order online (same order form as for boxes above). You MUST also submit your Fundraiser ApprovalForm.

2. EducateYourself

Document/Instruction	Purpose
The Quick 411 on ODFL	High level conceptual view of how ODFL works
What We Have Done	A list of projects accomplished in our first three years
Partner/Project Standard	How we keep quality control on building projects
Sample Project Proposal	A concrete example of a proposal to build a project
Three Meanings of ODFL	Deeper explanation of what we're doing. Online audio version
Frequently Asked Questions	Commonly asked questions with answers
Student Talking Points	Five points of emphasis about ODFL
What is ODFL?	Strongly–recommended. This is a six minute student-produced video explaining most facets of ODFL

3. Enlist Teachers

Document/Instruction	Purpose
Present the drive to every teacher	Very Important! At a faculty meeting, in departments, or one-on-one meetings. Ask for their help encouraging students.
Teacher's Letter	Adapt this to meet your school's/club's needs. Back it with either the "Quick 411"or "What We've Done" letter
What Teachers Say	Actual quotes from teachers sponsoring ODFL drives.
What Students Say	Actual quotes from ODFL student leaders
Before and After Photos *	These show actual projects we've completed, Before and After. Find many more of these under Supplementary Tools

4. Publicize

Document/Instruction	Purpose
Flyers	Print and hang these throughout the school. Or make your own with our ODFL Logo - BW or Colored
Dollar Bill Locker Insert	Print on green paper. Use in lockers, on windshields, or hand out individually to students
Public Service Announcements	Download these .mp3 audio and video files for daily announcements or create your own with our ODFL Logo - BW or Colored. Or use ODFL on YouTube. Los Gatos HS's PSA
Facebook pyramid	Coordinate with other clubs. Get the whole school on board! Also ODFL on causes.com
Send photos to ODFL Mail or FTP	School and team members. We'll publicize on our web site! Mail a CD to ODFL or contact webmaster@odfl.org for details on how to FTP photos to ODFL.
Press Release - sample 1 Press Release - sample 2 Press Release - sample 3	Send a story to school and local newspapers. Usually takes a few weeks lead time

5. Execute

Document/Instruction	Purpose
Box Label Template	Print and attach one to each collection box
Box Control Form	Create a form like this on a spreadsheet to manage collections from each classroom.
Public Service Announcements 83MB	Create and/or run these every day throughout the drive or create your own with our ODFL Logo - BW or Colored. Or use ODFL on YouTube. Los Gatos HS's PSA
Other	Schools have done car washes, fashion shows, art auctions, dances, be creative!
Follow-up with newspaper - sample	Report results, send pictures of student team
Follow-up with ODFL	Have school bookkeeper send check for funds to ODFL - address in footer below
Follow-up with your school	Publicize to school when pictures of your project start coming back

Brazil Considers Adding 'Happiness' To Constitution

2011-02-14T18:49:00.001-08:00

constitutional amendment
to protect the pursuit of happiness

make the search for happiness an inalienable right

the Happier Movement, a non-governmental organization backing the legislation

Both Japan and South Korea include the right to happiness in their constitutions

Bhutan pioneered the idea of maintaining a "happiness index." W
1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence made its often-noted stand for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

"pursuit of happiness" into Article 6 of the constitution, which states that education, health, food, work, housing, leisure and security – among other issues – are the social rights of all citizens.

holding to account a government that has long been accused of not providing basic services to the poor.

"This great proposal would establish tools that would permit, in the pursuit of happiness, the rescue of social rights,"
change expectations.

Brazil Considers Adding 'Happiness' To Constitution

MARCO SIBAJA 02/ 2/11 07:20 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/02/brazil-happiness-constitution_n_817397.html

BRASILIA, Brazil — In a nation known for its jubilant spirit, massive parties and seemingly intrinsic ability to celebrate anything under the sun, is a constitutional amendment really required to protect the pursuit of happiness?

Several lawmakers think so, and a bill to amend Brazil's Constitution to make the search for happiness an inalienable right is widely expected to be approved soon by the Senate, which reconvened Tuesday. The bill would then go to the lower house.

The debate comes a month before Brazil's Carnival, a raucous festival replete with tens of thousands half-naked men and women that Rio officials call the largest party on Earth. But supporters say the happiness bill is a serious undertaking despite the revelry, meant to address Brazil's stark economic and social inequalities.

"In Brazil, we've had economic growth without the social growth hoped for," said Mauro Motoryn, the director of the Happier Movement, a non-governmental organization backing the legislation. "With the constitutional amendment, we want to provoke discussion, to seek approval for the creation of conditions in which social rights are upheld."

Similar explorations of officially finding happiness have been pushed by other governments. Both Japan and South Korea include the right to happiness in their constitutions, and earlier this month, the British government detailed plans to begin a $3 million project to measure citizens' well being.

In the early 1970s, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan pioneered the idea of maintaining a "happiness index." Well before that, the 1776 U.S. Declaration of Independence made its often-noted stand for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

The bill before Brazil's Congress would insert the phrase "pursuit of happiness" into Article 6 of the constitution, which states that education, health, food, work, housing, leisure and security – among other issues – are the social rights of all citizens.

Cristovam Buarque, a senator and former minister of education who is the bill's sponsor in the Senate, said adding the "pursuit of happiness" was essential to helping ordinary people begin holding to account a government that has long been accused of not providing basic services to the poor.

While Brazil is on track to becoming the world's fifth largest economy by the time its hosts the 2016 Olympics, it's lagging public education system, poor roads and railways and crime-ridden slums threaten further advances.

Cristiano Paixao, a constitutional law expert and professor at the University of Brasilia, said he thought the proposed amendment was pointless tinkering that would end up being "legal folklore" as Brazil's democracy has moved beyond the need for such gimmicks since the end of the 1964-85 military dictatorship.

"It would make sense if we were in the moment of redemocratization, of the movement for direct elections," he said. "Now, it just won't be of use."

At a Senate hearing before the bill was passed by a committee last November, Daniel Seidel of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops criticized the "pursuit of happiness" movement as little more than a marketing campaign that didn't propose solutions to Brazil's social woes.

"Wouldn't it be better to speak clearly about social welfare, about the reduction of inequality?" he asked senators.

But Luciano Borges, president of the National Association of Public Defenders, said the movement could breathe life into a legal push for stronger social rights.

"This great proposal would establish tools that would permit, in the pursuit of happiness, the rescue of social rights," he said.

Motoryn, of the Happier Movement, said he is simply hoping society will take a serious look at the proposed amendment, and perhaps change their expectations.

"Happiness isn't a game, people confuse it with something that is superfluous and it isn't," he said. "We need quality health care, which we don't have. We need quality education, which we don't have.

"It's about creating conditions for people to pursue happiness, but with training, with knowledge, preparing us to be a more advanced society in the future."

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How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life

2011-01-22T08:15:00.001-08:00

How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life

link

THE SLOW INSIDIOUS DISPLACEMENT of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties. In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from MacDonald’s. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved “food.” More meals are eaten in the minivan than the kitchen.

Research shows that children who have regular meals with their parents do better in every way, from better grades, to healthier relationships, to staying out of trouble. They are 42 percent less likely to drink, 50 percent less likely to smoke and 66 percent less like to smoke marijuana. Regular family dinners protect girls from bulimia, anorexia, and diet pills. Family dinners also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. In a study on household routines and obesity in US pre-school aged children, it was shown that kids as young as four have a lower risk of obesity if they eat regular family dinners, have enough sleep, and don’t watch TV on weekdays.

We complain of not having enough time to cook, but Americans spend more time watching cooking on the Food Network, than actually preparing their own meals. In his series Food Revolution, Jamie Oliver showed us how we have raised a generation of Americans who can’t recognize a single vegetable or fruit, and don’t know how to cook.

I believe the most important and the most powerful tool you have to change your health and the world is your fork.

The family dinner has been hijacked by the food industry. The transformations of the American home and meal outlined above did not happen by accident. Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans, and other whole foods don’t need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods—the foods we co-evolved with over millennia—had to be “improved” by Food Science. As a result, the processed-food industry and industrial agriculture has changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.

That we need nutritionists and doctors to teach us how to eat is a sad reflection of the state of society. These are things our grandparents knew without thinking twice about them. What foods to eat, how to prepare them, and an understanding of why you should share them in family and community have been embedded in cultural traditions since the dawn of human society.

One hundred years ago all we ate was local, organic food; grass-fed, real, whole food. There were no fast-food restaurants, there was no junk food, there was no frozen food—there was just what your mother or grandmother made. Most meals were eaten at home. In the modern age that tradition, that knowledge, is being lost.

The sustainability of our planet, our health, and our food supply are inextricably linked. The ecology of eating—the importance of what you put on your fork—has never been more critical to our survival as a nation or as a species. The earth will survive our self-destruction. But we may not.

Common sense and scientific research lead us to the conclusion that if we want healthy bodies we must put the right raw materials in them: real; whole; local; fresh; unadulterated; unprocessed; and chemical-, hormone-, and antibiotic-free food. There is no role for foreign molecules such as trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup, or for industrially developed and processed food that interferes with our biology at every level.

That is why I believe the most important and the most powerful tool you have to change your health and the world is your fork. Imagine an experiment—let’s call it a celebration: We call upon the people of the world to join together and celebrate food for one week. For one week or even one day, we all eat breakfast and dinner at home with our families or friends. For one week we all eat only real, whole, fresh food. Imagine for a moment the power of the fork to change the world.

The extraordinary thing is that we have the ability to move large corporations and create social change by our collective choices. We can reclaim the family dinner, reviving and renewing it. Doing so will help us learn how to find and prepare real food quickly and simply, teach our children by example how to connect, build security, safety and social skills, meal after meal, day after day, year after year.

Here are some tips that will help you take back the family dinner in your home starting today.

Reclaim Your Kitchen

Throw away any foods with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats or sugar or fat as the first or second ingredient on the label. Fill your shelves with real fresh, whole, local foods when possible. And join a community support agriculture network to get a cheaper supply of fresh vegetables weekly or frequent farmers markets.

Reinstate the Family Dinner

Read Laurie David’s The Family Dinner. She suggests the following guidelines: Make a set dinnertime, no phones or texting during dinner, everyone eats the same meal, no television, only filtered or tap water, invite friends and family, everyone clean up together.

Eat Together

No matter how modest the meal, create a special place to sit down together, and set the table with care and respect. Savor the ritual of the table. Mealtime is a time for empathy and generosity, a time to nourish and communicate.

Learn How to Cook and Shop

You can make this a family activity, and it does not need to take a ton of time. Keep meals quick and simple.

Plant a Garden

This is the most nutritious, tastiest, environmentally friendly food you will ever eat.

Conserve, Compost, and Recycle

Bring your own shopping bags to the market, recycle your paper, cans, bottles and plastic and start a compost bucket (and find where in your community you can share you goodies).

Invest in Food

As Alice Waters says, food is precious. We should treat it that way. Americans currently spend less than10 percent of their income on food, while most European’s spend about 20 percent of their income on food. We will be more nourished by good food than by more stuff. And we will save ourselves much money and costs over our lifetime.

Now I’d like to hear from you.

Do you think the health of our planet and the health of our diet are linked? How?

Which of the steps outlined above have you taken in your own life and how have they worked for you?

What ideas do you have that will help us reclaim the family dinner and revive the tradition of eating real, whole foods?

Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

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Governor Brown Cuts Governor's Office Budget By 25% & Returns 84% of Transition Funds

2011-01-08T14:06:00.001-08:00

Governor Brown Cuts Governor's Office Budget By 25% & Returns 84% of Transition Funds

cutting spending in the Governor’s Office by 25 percent—$4.5 million
eliminating the Office of the Secretary of Education, ... save the state $1.9 million.
returning to the state treasury 84 percent—$650,000—of the $770,000 allocated in the 2010 budget for his transition.
or a total savings of $7.05 million.

• Eliminating the position of Cabinet Secretary and all deputy cabinet secretaries.
and more

This is only the first week in office...
--
[Show me any other Governor or public official doing anything like this - and much more to come.]
===

Governor Jerry Brown Returns 84 Percent of Transition Funds to California Treasury     Print     E-mail
Written by Imperial Valley News
Saturday, 08 January 2011
http://imperialvalleynews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9149&Itemid=2

Sacramento, California - Governor Jerry Brown announced that he is returning 84 percent of the Governor’s transition fund, making sharp cutbacks in the Governor’s Office, and eliminating the Office of the Secretary of Education, for a total savings of $7.05 million.

“California is facing a huge deficit and it is necessary to find savings throughout all of government. We all have to make cuts and I’m starting with my own office,” said Governor Brown.

• His administration is returning to the state treasury 84 percent—$650,000—of the $770,000 allocated in the 2010 budget for his transition. His administration spent $120,000 on the transition.
• Governor Brown is cutting spending in the Governor’s Office by 25 percent—$4.5 million—in the budget that will go the Legislature on Monday.
• His budget also eliminates funding for the Office of the Secretary of Education. This will save the state $1.9 million.
• The total savings from these actions is $7.05 million.

To achieve the 25 percent savings in his own office, the Governor is making cuts that include:

• Cutting the Governor's Washington, D.C. office staff.
• Cutting the Governor's press and communications staff.
• Eliminating the position of Cabinet Secretary and all deputy cabinet secretaries.
• Eliminating the Office of the First Lady.
• Closing the Governor’s field offices in San Diego, Fresno, and Riverside.
• Eliminating the Office of the American Reinvestment and the Recovery Act Inspector General six months ahead of schedule, as previously announced.

The 2010 Budget Act included a total of $18 million for the Governor’s Office. After the 25 percent reduction, the total Governor’s Office budget in 2011 will be $13.4 million.

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Movie - American Pastime - About Life In American Concentration Camp

2010-12-18T16:22:00.001-08:00

American Pastime - a movie worth watching.

Set in LA and American Concentration Camp for internment of American citizens of Japanese descent - over 120,000.

The movie deals with multiple issues - jazz, to enlist or not, creating community no matter what the circumstance, family, racism, sexism, parental harms, anger directed at others, the cost of war to families and the people involved in them, celebrating American holidays and baseball.

Great examples of transcendence beyond being victim. Also examples of dealing with bullies. And human dignity at many levels.

What would today's ready made concentration camps be like if they are put to use.

---
(Canada also had internment of 20,000 of their citizens. One of the earlier American use of concentration camps was in 1830 for Cherokee and other Native Americans, in the late 1890s American's set up concentration camps in the Philippine-American War.)

===

More at IMDbPro »

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0825225/

105 min - Drama - 14 May 2007 (USA)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 6.6/10 X

Users: (397 votes) 8 reviews | Critics: 6 reviews

The first scene shows the life of the Nomura family, a typical American family of Japanese descent in 1941...

---

User Reviews

8 reviews

Worth seeing "American Pastime"

21 May 2007 | by justgazin (United States) – See all my reviews

When I saw the movie "American Pastime", there was a Q and A afterward. This film is a compilation of many of the experiences that friends and relatives of the screen writer had during the Japanese internment camps of WWII. The producer and director stated that the entire film was filmed in Utah, near where one of the internment camps had been, so the actors could feel and understand even the weather, sand, and restrictive situations that happened.

Inspite of the seriousness of the situation, the viewer will laugh, think, and cry as they watch this film. The baseball scenes were fun, but one knows it was a bit over the top. That didn't hurt the film though. During the Q and A, we were told that baseball really was a big part of life at internment camps.

The actors were sincere. I only hope that because this film is a small budget film, that it does not get lost in the shuffle. I think it was one of the best films I have seen this year, and I go to the movies a lot..It is a sure thing.

(2007) More at IMDbPro »

Year	Result	Award	Category/Recipient(s)
San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival
2007	Won	Audience Award	Drama Desmond Nakano
2007	Won	Audience Award	Drama Tony Kayden Desmond Nakano

Foods you should buy from organic sources

2010-12-17T21:54:00.000-08:00

Foods you should buy from organic sources

Friday, December 17, 2010 by: Shona Botes, citizen journalist
http://www.naturalnews.com/030754_organic_food_health.html

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030754_organic_food_health.html#ixzz18RKZNBIX

(NaturalNews) Organic foods have started taking root (no pun intended) in the minds of more and more consumers each year as people strive to live healthier lives.

Not only do they taste a lot better (without the help of chemicals and flavour enhancers), but they also provide far more nutrients and benefits than their often irradiated and chemically fertilized counterparts. Admittedly, organic foods are often more expensive, but the benefits of consuming them are well worth the expense.

While growing, some foods absorb a lot more chemical fertilizers and pesticides than others, so they should be bought organically as much as possible. There are still cases where crops are absorbing Dieldrin (a highly carcinogenic insecticide) from soil, even though it was banned way back in 1974!

Some foods absorb a lot more chemicals than others, so even if you truly cannot afford to purchase all organic foods, there are some that you should only ever buy organic:

Apples:

Apples absorb more pesticides than any other fruit. Around 36 different chemicals have been discovered on them. There were as many as seven different chemicals found on a single apple. Therefore, it makes good sense to only purchase these from an organic source. Alternative options for these would be tangerines, bananas and watermelon.

Strawberries:

These are also among the most contaminated fruits you can buy. If you cannot buy these organic, rather opt for kiwifruit or pineapple.

Peaches:

These have also been known to absorb far more chemicals and pesticides than other fruits.

Baby Foods:

Babies and children have developing immune systems, so it's very important for them to be exposed to as little pesticides and chemicals as possible. Wherever possible, purchase organic baby foods, or better still, make and puree your own, using organic fruit and vegetables.

Blueberries:

These may be hailed as a superfood, but this only applies if they are organic. Tests have shown them to be contaminated with as many as 52 different pesticides.

Dairy Products:

Most cows consume grain that contains chemicals, pesticides and antibiotics. Wherever possible, try to source organic dairy products. Or better still, 100% raw milk and cheese will be 100% healthy and nutritious, unlike the pasteurized versions.

Nectarines:

These contain as many as 33 different chemicals and pesticides. If they are not available as organic, safer alternatives would be papaya, watermelon and mango.

Cucumbers:

These have been ranked as one of the most contaminated fresh foods.

Bell Peppers:

Because these have a very thin skin, they absorb pesticides and chemicals very easily. Should they not be available as organic, safer alternatives to these would include peas, cabbage and broccoli.

Grapes:

These can contain as many as 17 different chemicals and pesticides. They are also very high in fructose, so they should be consumed in moderation. Safer alternatives include kiwifruit and raspberries.

Spinach and Kale:

The leaves of these two vegetables are capable of absorbing as many as 48 different pesticides, so it is very important to only use the organic varieties. Safer alternatives would be cabbage, broccoli and asparagus.

Potatoes:

Potatoes have been known to absorb as many as 37 chemicals and pesticides. Safer alternatives to these would be mushrooms, eggplant and cabbage.

Winter Squash:

These have also been known to absorb Dieldrin from soil.

Green beans:

These unfortunately rank high on the contamination list, with as many as 60 different pesticides being used on them.

Meat Products:

Organic meats are always healthier, as they contain no growth hormones and stand little to no chance of containing any pesticide products.

Sources:
http://www.thedailygreen.com/health...
http://business-ethics.com/2010/07/...
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/a...

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030754_organic_food_health.html#ixzz18RKJMyxY

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Youth Activists Plan Co-Operation Over Protest at Cancún Climate Summit

2010-11-26T17:05:00.001-08:00

U.S., Chinese Youth Join Forces

Disputes between the U.S. and China, the two biggest emitters of global warming gases, have stymied progress on a global climate deal.

Recognizing that, youth from both nations launched an unofficial collaboration a little over a month ago called the U.S.-China Youth Climate Exchange.

Members of the partnership will carry out workshops and shared actions in Cancun.

"Sino-American relations have been characterized by mistrust," said Jared Schy of the Cascade Climate Network and the new U.S.-China exchange. "We hope to strengthen trust between our countries by growing our own trust. We hope ... to show the world in a more visible way that China and the U.S. are working together now."
===

Youth Activists Plan Co-Operation Over Protest at Cancún Climate Summit

With few government heads expected in Mexico, influence will come behind the scenes, not in front of a camera

by Stacy Feldman from SolveClimate
Published on Friday, November 26, 2010 by The Guardian/UK

What a difference a year makes for climate change activism.

Police made some 400 arrests at a mass rally in Copenhagen, during the 2009 UN climate summit. Such protests and arrests are unlikely at the successor conference, COP16 in Cancún. (Photograph: Mads Nissen/AFP/Getty Images)

Twelve months ago, thousands of young campaigners worldwide converged on Copenhagen to pitch protests against the global political failure to tackle global warming.

They disrupted summit meetings with non-violent civil disobedience to air demands of climate justice. Scores were arrested. Naomi Klein, the writer and activist, said at the time that it felt as though "progressive tectonic plates are shifting."

But a year later — with the start of the next big climate-treaty conference in Cancun, Mexico, days away — activists appear to have dramatically changed their emphasis from confrontation to cooperation.

"There are certain times when it's useful to take a more critical tone and times when it's useful to take a more collaborative tone," said Michael Davidson of SustainUS, an all-volunteer climate action group.

The two meetings "are extremely different," he noted. For one, the eyes of the world were on Copenhagen as 120 heads of state attended, garnering gobs of global media coverage for the summit — and youth-led protests.

But few government heads are expected in Mexico, meaning that a majority of advocates' influence will be behind the scenes, not in front of the camera.

A Model for Progress

In lower-key Cancun, one of the main goals of young people will be to set an example of progress for quarreling climate negotiators, Davidson said.

"Youth have cooperated within negotiations in an extremely intricate way — in some ways much more than other civil society participants," he said. "We're trying to present a model for what delegates should be doing in order to push forward solutions."

"We're not giving up on trying to get countries to actually cooperate," Davidson continued.

Beyond that, SustainUS announced this week that they will use Cancun to fight for a legally binding deal to curb climate-altering emissions — their ultimate goal — and will make the strong link between carbon-cutting clean energy development and job creation.

They also want to stress that vulnerable populations would suffer disproportionately if climate change is ignored — including themselves.

"We're doing this because our future is at stake," Marcie Smith, co-chair of SustainUS, told reporters on a conference call detailing their strategies.

Activists, who align themselves with developing-country governments, suffered defeat at the negotiations in Copenhagen last December, after the 194 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change failed to deliver a post-2012 pact to slow warming.

Agreement is still far off.

The Nov. 29 – Dec. 10 Cancun talks are expected to make progress on some issues, such as green technology transfers and slowing deforestation, but will not a produce a new treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

U.S., Chinese Youth Join Forces

Disputes between the U.S. and China, the two biggest emitters of global warming gases, have stymied progress on a global climate deal.

Recognizing that, youth from both nations launched an unofficial collaboration a little over a month ago called the U.S.-China Youth Climate Exchange.

Members of the partnership will carry out workshops and shared actions in Cancun.

Influencing U.S. Policy from Cancun

Reed Aronow of SustainUS said activists will lead a "series of creative actions and campaigns" in Cancun centered on getting both meaningful treaty text and climate change legislation in the United States.

Their biggest Cancun campaign, run in conjunction with the Energy Action Coalition, will be the grassroots Rapid Response Network. Organizers will enlist a crew of U.S.-based "climate responders" who will be called on to take action at home when big developments happen in Cancun.

"We're hoping through the ... network to build up media pressure back home," Davidson said.

The goal is to draw 25,000 participants, Aronow said.

Their other tactics may ring a more familiar note. Among planned protests, youth activists, dressed as penguins, will hold signs that read, "Save the humans," in what they're calling the "March of the Penguins."

Davidson said he is "not aware of any actions to shut down the talks."

This article originally appeared at SolveClimate.

Rethinking the Global Economy: The Case for Sharing

2010-11-26T16:59:00.001-08:00

Rethinking the Global Economy: The Case for Sharing

by Rajesh Makwana and Adam Parsons
Published on Friday, November 26, 2010 by Share the World's Resources (STWR)

As the 21st Century unfolds, humanity is faced with a stark reality. Following the world stock market crash in 2008, people everywhere are questioning the unbridled greed, selfishness and competition that has driven the dominant economic model for decades. The old obsession with protecting national interests, the drive to maximise profits at all costs, and the materialistic pursuit of economic growth has failed to benefit the world's poor and led to catastrophic consequences for planet earth.

The incidence of hunger is more widespread than ever before in human history, surpassing 1 billion people in 2009 despite the record harvests of food being reaped in recent years. At least 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty, a number equivalent to more than four times the population of the United States. One out of every five people does not have access to clean drinking water. More than a billion people lack access to basic health care services, while over a billion people - the majority of them women - lack a basic education. Every week, more than 115,000 people move into a slum somewhere in Africa, Asia or Latin America. Every day, around 50,000 people die needlessly as a result of being denied the essentials of life.

In the face of these immense challenges, international aid has proven largely ineffective, inadequate, and incapable of enabling governments to secure the basic needs of all citizens. Developed countries were cutting back on foreign aid commitments even before the economic downturn, while the agreed aid target of 0.7 percent of rich countries' GDP has never been met since it was first conceived 40 years ago. The Millennium Development Goals of merely halving the incidence of hunger and extreme poverty, even if reached by 2015, will still leave hundreds of millions of people in a state of undernourishment and deprivation. When several trillion dollars was rapidly summoned to bail out failed banks in late 2008, it became impossible to understand why the governments of rich nations could not afford a fraction of this sum to ‘bail out' the world's poor.

The enduring gap between rich and poor, both within and between countries, is a crisis that lies at the heart of our political and economic problems. For decades, 20 percent of the world population have controlled 80 percent of the economy and resources. By 2008, more than half of the world's assets were owned by the richest 2 percent of adults, while the bottom half of the world adult population owned only 1 percent of wealth. The vast discrepancies in living standards between the Global North and South, which provides no basis for a stable and secure future, can only be redressed through a more equitable distribution of resources at the international level. This will require more inclusive structures of global governance and a new economic framework that goes far beyond existing development efforts to reduce poverty, decrease poor country debt and provide overseas aid.

In both the richest and poorest nations, commercialisation has infiltrated every aspect of life and compromised spiritual, ethical and moral values. The globalised consumer culture holds no higher aspiration than the accumulation of material wealth, even though studies have shown that rising income fails to significantly increase an individual's well-being once a minimum standard of living is secured. The organisation of society as a competitive struggle for social position through wealth and acquisition has led to rampant individualism and the consequences of crime, disaffection and the disintegration of family and community ties. Yet governments continue to measure success in terms of economic growth, pursuing ever-greater levels of GDP - regardless of the harmful social consequences of a consumption-driven economy.

Although the crises we face are interlinked and multidimensional, the G20 and other rich nations offer no vision of change towards a more sustainable world. The old formula, based on deregulation, privatisation, and the liberalisation of trade and finance, was unmasked by the economic crisis and shown to be incapable of promoting lasting human development. Multilateral institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have failed the world's poor, and the myth that economic growth will eventually benefit all has long been shattered. As we also know, endless growth is unsustainable on a planet with finite resources. This impasse is further compounded by ecological degradation and climate change - the side-effects of economic ‘progress' that disproportionately affect the poorest people who are least to blame for causing these multiple crises.

Humanity's ability to effectively address these interrelated crises requires governments to accept certain fundamental understandings that are instrumental to securing our common future. Firstly, that humankind is part of an extended family that shares the same basic needs and rights, and this must be adequately reflected in the structures and institutions of global governance. And secondly, that many basic assumptions about human nature that inform the thrust of economic decision making - particularly in industrialied nations - are long outdated and fundamentally flawed. The creation of an inclusive economic framework that reflects our global interdependence requires policymakers to move beyond the belief that human beings are competitive and individualistic, and to instead accept humanity's innate propensity to cooperate and share. This more holistic understanding of our relationship to each other and the planet transcends nations and cultures, and builds on ethics and values common to faith groups around the world. It also reflects the strong sense of solidarity and internationalism which lies at the heart of the global justice movement.

International Unity

The first true political expression of our global unity was embodied in the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. Since then, international laws have been devised to help govern relationships between nations and uphold human rights. Cross-border issues such as climate change, global poverty and conflict are uniting world public opinion and compelling governments to cooperate and plan for our collective future. The globalisation of knowledge and cultures, and the ease with which we can communicate and travel around the world, has further served to unite diverse people in distant countries.

But the fact of our global unity is still not sufficiently expressed in our political and economic structures. The international community has yet to ensure that basic human needs, such as access to staple food, clean water and primary healthcare, are universally secured. This cannot be achieved until nations cooperate more effectively, share their natural and economic resources, and ensure that global governance mechanisms reflect and directly support our common needs and rights. At present, the main institutions that govern the global economy are failing to work on behalf of humanity as a whole. In particular, the major bodies that uphold the Bretton Woods mandate (the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation) are all widely criticised for being undemocratic and furthering the interests of large corporations and rich countries.

A more inclusive international framework urgently needs to be established through the United Nations (UN) and its agencies. Although in need of being significantly strengthened and renewed, the UN is the only multilateral governmental agency with the necessary experience and resources to coordinate the process of restructuring the world economy. The UN Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights have been adopted by all member states and embody some of the highest ideals expressed by humanity. If the UN is rendered more democratic and entrusted with more authority, it would be in a position to foster the growing sense of community between nations and harmonise global economic relationships.

Being Human

Establishing more inclusive structures of global governance will only remedy one aspect of a complex system. Another key transformation that must take place is in our understanding and practice of ‘economics' so that government policies can become closely aligned with urgent humanitarian and ecological needs.

The economic principles that have fashioned the world's existing global governance framework - particularly in relation to international trade and finance - can be traced back to the moral philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers during the emergence of industrial society in Britain. Drawing on the ideas of these early theorists, mainstream economists have assumed that human beings are inherently selfish, competitive, acquisitive and individualistic. Such notions about human nature are now firmly established as the principles upon which modern economies are built, and have been used to justify the proliferation of free markets as the best way to organise societies.

Particularly since the 1980's, these basic economic assumptions have increasingly dominated public policy and pushed aside ethical considerations in the pursuit of efficiency, short-term growth and profit maximisation. But the ‘neoliberal' ideology that institutionalised greed and self-interest was fundamentally discredited by the collapse of banks and a world stock market crash in 2008. As a consequence, the global financial crisis reinvigorated a long-standing debate about the importance of morality and ethics in relation to the market economy.

At the same time, recent experiments by evolutionary biologists and neuro-cognitive scientists have demonstrated that human beings are biologically predisposed to cooperate and share. Without this evolutionary advantage, we may not have survived as a species. Anthropological findings have long supported this view of human nature with case studies revealing that sharing and gifting often formed the basis of economic life in traditional societies, leading individuals to prioritise their social relationships above all other concerns. As a whole, these findings challenge many of the core assumptions of classical economic theory - in particular the firmly held belief that people in any society will always act competitively to maximise their economic interests.

If humanity is to survive the formidable challenges that define our generation - including climate change, diminishing fossil fuels and global conflict - it is necessary to forge new ethical understandings that embrace our collective values and global interdependence. We urgently need a new paradigm for human advancement, beginning with a fundamental reordering of world priorities: an immediate end to hunger, the securing of universal basic needs, and a rapid safeguarding of the environment and atmosphere. No longer can national self-interest, international competition and excessive commercialisation form the foundation of our global economic framework.

The crucial first step towards creating an inclusive world system requires overhauling our outdated assumptions about human nature, reconnecting our public life with fundamental values, and rethinking the role of markets in achieving the common good. In line with what we now know about human behaviour and psychology, integrating the principle of sharing into our economic system would reflect our global unity and have far-reaching implications for how we distribute and consume the planet's wealth and resources. Sharing the world's resources more equitably can allow us to build a more sustainable, cooperative and inclusive global economy - one that reflects and supports what it really means to be human.

This article has been adapted from sections of a recent booklet entitled Sharing the World's Resources - An Introduction

Rajesh Makwana is the director of Share The World's Resources and can be contacted at rajesh(at)stwr.org. Adam Parsons is the editor at Share The World's Resources and can be contacted at adam(at)stwr.org.

Nutrition & Elimination Of Toxins Prevent & Cure Disease: Antoine Bechamp vs. Louis Pasteur

2010-11-14T08:44:00.001-08:00

most illness is due to cellular malfunction caused by cellular toxicities and cellular malnutrition, both of which can be avoided and overcome naturally.

Louis Pasteur, the so-called "father of modern germ theory" so widely revered by mainstream medicine,

a more esteemed contemporary whose works Pasteur plagiarized and distorted.
Antoine Bechamp, one of France`s most prominent and active researchers and biologists whose theories and research results stood in stark opposition to Pasteur`s germ theory.

Bechamp, on the other hand, proved through original research that most diseases are the result of diseased tissue and that bacteria and viruses are largely after-effects instead of causes of disease.

Antoine Bechamp was able to scientifically prove that germs are the chemical by-products and constituents of pleomorphic microorganisms enacting upon the unbalanced, malfunctioning cell metabolism and dead tissue that actually produces disease. Bechamp found that the diseased, acidic, low-oxygen cellular environment is created by a toxic/nutrient deficient diet, toxic emotions, and a toxic lifestyle.

Pasteur`s germ theory ended up winning the day with mainstream medicine - owing in large part to the fact that the theory enabled mainstream medicine to hugely profit from the patented drugs and treatments for fighting germs.

Hippocrates also advised, "Leave your drugs in the chemist`s pots if you can cure your patient with food."

Lack of nutrition combined with exposure to toxins is what causes us to become ill.

the words of Thomas Edison may prove to be a welcome prophesy:
"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
+++

Louis Pasteur vs. Antoine Bechamp: Know the True Causes of Disease

Saturday, November 13, 2010 by: Tony Isaacs, citizen journalist
http://www.naturalnews.com/030384_Louis_Pasteur_disease.html

(NaturalNews) Mainstream medicine believes that virtually all illness is caused by germs or genetic hereditary weakness, as well as deformities and trauma injuries. Their solution and strategy is to have us believe that there are over 10,000 different diseases and that each of these diseases requires outside intervention from drugs and surgery. The truth is that most illness is due to cellular malfunction caused by cellular toxicities and cellular malnutrition, both of which can be avoided and overcome naturally.

It was Louis Pasteur, the so-called "father of modern germ theory" so widely revered by mainstream medicine, who was largely responsible for germ theory being a primary precept of today`s medical practice. Few people are aware of the controversy which surrounded Pasteur in his early days or of the work of a more esteemed contemporary whose works Pasteur plagiarized and distorted. That contemporary was fellow French Academy of Sciences member Antoine Bechamp, one of France`s most prominent and active researchers and biologists whose theories and research results stood in stark opposition to Pasteur`s germ theory.

Pasteur essentially dug up the germ theory of disease and put his name on it. It wasn`t a new idea. The concept, which theorizes that many diseases are caused by germs, had actually been outlined by other people many years before. Pasteur nevertheless claimed to have "discovered" germs. Bechamp, on the other hand, proved through original research that most diseases are the result of diseased tissue and that bacteria and viruses are largely after-effects instead of causes of disease.

Antoine Bechamp was able to scientifically prove that germs are the chemical by-products and constituents of pleomorphic microorganisms enacting upon the unbalanced, malfunctioning cell metabolism and dead tissue that actually produces disease. Bechamp found that the diseased, acidic, low-oxygen cellular environment is created by a toxic/nutrient deficient diet, toxic emotions, and a toxic lifestyle. His findings demonstrate how cancer develops through the morbid changes of germs to bacteria, bacteria to viruses, viruses to fungal forms and fungal forms to cancer cells.

After some initial controversy, Pasteur`s germ theory ended up winning the day with mainstream medicine - owing in large part to the fact that the theory enabled mainstream medicine to hugely profit from the patented drugs and treatments for fighting germs. After all, had Bechamp`s discoveries been incorporated into current medical curriculum, it would likely have meant a virtual elimination of disease and the end of the pharmaceutical industry.

The germ theory of medicine stands in stark contrast to thousands of years of man looking to nature to nourish and heal it, dating back to ancient Chinese medicine which treated the whole body instead of the symptoms of illness. As Hippocrates, "the father of medicine" observed 2400 years ago, "Nature is the physician of man." Hippocrates also advised, "Leave your drugs in the chemist`s pots if you can cure your patient with food."

Though mainstream medicine might have us believe otherwise, the simple truth is that no one ever became ill due to a deficiency in pharmaceutical drugs. Lack of nutrition combined with exposure to toxins is what causes us to become ill.

Someday, germ theory and unnatural drugs will be relegated to the science junk pile where they belong and man will re-discover the value of eating a nutrient-dense organic diet, avoiding toxins and nutritional deficiencies and living a healthy lifestyle. When that happens, the words of Thomas Edison may prove to be a welcome prophesy:

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."

Sources included:

http://arizonaenergy.org/BodyEnergy...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_t...
"Cellular Toxicities & Cellular Insufficiencies", The Crusador, May/June 2010 edition
http://www.naturalnews.com/028093_l...

About the author

Tony Isaacs, is a natural health author, advocate and researcher who hosts The Best Years in Life website for baby boomers and others wishing to avoid prescription drugs and mainstream managed illness and live longer, healthier and happier lives naturally. Mr. Isaacs is the author of books and articles about natural health, longevity and beating cancer including "Cancer's Natural Enemy" and is working on a major book project due to be published later this year.
Mr. Isaacs is currently residing in scenic East Texas and frequently commutes to the even more scenic Texas hill country near San Antonio and Austin to give lectures in health seminars. He also hosts the CureZone "Ask Tony Isaacs - featuring Luella May" forum as well as the Yahoo Health Group "Oleander Soup" and he serves as a consultant to the "Utopia Silver Supplement Company".

Articles Related to This Article:

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• Disease names like diabetes and osteoporosis are misleading and misinform patients about disease prevention

• Heal yourself in 15 days: Stop making disease by embracing the recipe for health (part eight)

• Psychiatry and disease mongering: Road Rage Disorder is latest spontaneously "discovered" disease

• The Cure Con: how you're being deceived by charities that claim to be racing for the cure for cancer and other chronic diseases

• Medical myths explained: Why health researchers mistakenly think one disease causes another

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Social Enchantment With Values And Emotions For A Better World For Everyone

2010-11-13T14:06:00.001-08:00

Valuing and sharing common people's knowledge and experience, awakening critical consciousness and finding paths for effective social participation

people come together, sharing their own thoughts and feelings, with a strong sense of commitment and full awareness of what they are doing,"

people who train in the methodology of popular education experience "re-enchantment" with values and emotions that are denied by the competitive and individualistic culture of free market societies. "They fall in love again with a social project, with what they do, with service, solidarity and sharing,"

encourage people to become critical subjects who were capable of collectively solving their problems, managing their lives and transforming their surroundings.

"Popular Education is that knowledge that we have and build on, but when we organise it, it frees us from the bonds created by the consumer society."

"a person takes up the reins of their own life,"

it is vital to bring [people] to this kind of learning, so that they
"take power over their own bodies [and minds] and do not allow others to make decisions for them."
+++

Cuba: Popular Education Transforms Lives

November 13, 2010
http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=32830

HAVANA TIMES, Nov 13 (IPS) — Valuing and sharing common people’s knowledge and experience, awakening critical consciousness and finding paths for effective social participation are the processes used by more than 1,000 people in Cuba working in Popular Education, a liberating approach to education developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in the 1960s.

“The deepest form of participation is when people come together, sharing their own thoughts and feelings, with a strong sense of commitment and full awareness of what they are doing,” José Ramón Vidal, head of the Popular Communication Program at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Centre (CMMLK), told IPS.

Combining true dedication and horizontal ways of organizing to ensure everyone’s opinion was included, the Fourth National Popular Education Encounter was held Nov. 9-12 in the Cuban capital. Cuba has appropriated this educational approach since 1995, when the first workshop was organized.

This philosophy of critical awareness began to find followers in Cuba during the severe economic crisis suffered by the Cuban population in the 1990s. “The hardship we have endured for so many years creates despair and disillusion,” said Vidal, a psychologist.

Experiencing re-enchantment

In Vidal’s view, people who train in the methodology of popular education experience “re-enchantment” with values and emotions that are denied by the competitive and individualistic culture of free market societies. “They fall in love again with a social project, with what they do, with service, solidarity and sharing,” he said.

In the 15 years since the movement arrived in Cuba and the birth of the National Network of Popular Educators, which has about 1,500 members, Freire’s precepts have reached community groups and institutions around the country.

In Granma province in southeastern Cuba, “local bodies like the People’s Councils are adopting, timidly as yet, this way of doing, learning and organizing,” Yordenis Monge, coordinator of the Food Sovereignty and Local Development Project in the eastern city of Bayamo, told IPS.

Promoted by Cuban and Spanish non-governmental organizations in three provinces on the island, the outreach initiative involves, directly or indirectly, more than 60 institutions. “Leaders and their community work groups are now going through a Popular Education learning process,” Monge said.

Becoming critical subjects

Some authorities have recognized the benefits of this way of doing things. According to Mario Cruz Díaz, a member of the local legislature in the province of Holguín, which borders Granma, the method “is a great help in the work of directing, planning, forecasting and coordinating.”

In his province, which has a population of more than 300,000, distribution of the few resources available is difficult, and they must be used to the best effect. “When a person receives aid as welfare, without consciously participating, he or she is incapable of really valuing the cost of what they are given,” Cruz said.

Freire’s educational goal was to encourage people to become critical subjects who were capable of collectively solving their problems, managing their lives and transforming their surroundings. Community and environmental groups and neighborhoods facing difficulties like poverty and high levels of violence are taking up Popular Education.

Neighborhood Transformation Workshops in the Cuban capital, the Promotion and Education Centre for Sustainable Development (CEPRODESO) in the western province of Pinar del Río, the La Marina social and cultural project in Matanzas province, and some small farmers’ cooperatives are adopting the methodology.

At present, CMMLK is participating in the work of the National Network of Popular Educators in 17 Cuban provinces and municipalities. Most of the network’s members are women, according to María Isabel Romero, the coordinator of CMMLK’s Popular Education and Participating in Local Experiences Program.

Connections abroad

CMMLK also has connections with similar partners abroad, mainly in Latin America, and with social movements. The Cuban centre offers training and promotes Freire’s approach for the work of civil society groups in Latin America, Vidal said.

Brazilian theologian Frei Betto contributed to introducing this educational perspective in Cuba, and has closely followed its development. At the meeting, Betto said he brought “this contribution to the (Cuban) Revolution, out of conviction of the political importance of Popular Education methodology.”

Latin American activists like Messilene Gorete, of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), Honduran activist Salvador Zúñiga of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organization (COPINH), a member of the coalition of groups opposed to the June 2009 coup d’état, and Dolores Iveth Velasco of Equipo Maíz, a Salvadoran political education group, also attended the meeting.

Velasco is part of an education project working with a wide range of groups in El Salvador. In her view, “Popular Education is that knowledge that we have and build on, but when we organize it, it frees us from the bonds created by the consumer society.”

As a result of this liberating methodology, “a person takes up the reins of their own life,” she said. According to her social work experience, it is vital to bring women to this kind of learning, so that they “take power over their own bodies and do not allow others to make decisions for them.”
===

Popular Knowledge Can Transform People's Worlds

by Dalia Acosta
Published on Saturday, November 13, 2010 by Inter Press Service
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/13-0

HAVANA - Valuing and sharing common people's knowledge and experience, awakening critical consciousness and finding paths for effective social participation are the processes used by more than 1,000 people in Cuba working in Popular Education, a liberating approach to education developed by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in the 1960s.

"The deepest form of participation is when people come together, sharing their own thoughts and feelings, with a strong sense of commitment and full awareness of what they are doing," José Ramón Vidal, head of the Popular Communication Programme at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Centre (CMMLK), told IPS. Combining true dedication and horizontal ways of organising to ensure everyone's opinion was included, the Fourth National Popular Education Encounter was held Nov. 9-12 in the Cuban capital. Cuba has appropriated this educational approach since 1995, when the first workshop was organised.

Dolores Iveth Velasco of Equipo Maíz, a Salvadoran political education group, said, "Popular Education is that knowledge that we have and build on, but when we organise it, it frees us from the bonds created by the consumer society."(photo by Flickr user katerha)

This philosophy of critical awareness began to find followers in Cuba during the severe economic crisis suffered by the Cuban population in the 1990s. "The hardship we have endured for so many years creates despair and disillusion," said Vidal, a psychologist.

In Vidal's view, people who train in the methodology of popular education experience "re-enchantment" with values and emotions that are denied by the competitive and individualistic culture of free market societies. "They fall in love again with a social project, with what they do, with service, solidarity and sharing," he said.

In the 15 years since the movement arrived in Cuba and the birth of the National Network of Popular Educators, which has about 1,500 members, Freire's precepts have reached community groups and institutions around the country.

In Granma province in southeastern Cuba, "local bodies like the People's Councils are adopting, timidly as yet, this way of doing, learning and organising," Yordenis Monge, coordinator of the Food Sovereignty and Local Development Project in the eastern city of Bayamo, told IPS.

Promoted by Cuban and Spanish non-governmental organisations in three provinces on the island, the outreach initiative involves, directly or indirectly, more than 60 institutions. "Leaders and their community work groups are now going through a Popular Education learning process," Monge said.

Becoming critical subjects

Some authorities have recognised the benefits of this way of doing things. According to Mario Cruz Díaz, a member of the local legislature in the province of Holguín, which borders Granma, the method "is a great help in the work of directing, planning, forecasting and coordinating."

In his province, which has a population of more than 300,000, distribution of the few resources available is difficult, and they must be used to the best effect. "When a person receives aid as welfare, without consciously participating, he or she is incapable of really valuing the cost of what they are given," Cruz said.

Freire's educational goal was to encourage people to become critical subjects who were capable of collectively solving their problems, managing their lives and transforming their surroundings. Community and environmental groups and neighbourhoods facing difficulties like poverty and high levels of violence are taking up Popular Education.

Neighbourhood Transformation Workshops in the Cuban capital, the Promotion and Education Centre for Sustainable Development (CEPRODESO) in the western province of Pinar del Río, the La Marina social and cultural project in Matanzas province, and some small farmers' cooperatives are adopting the methodology.

At present, CMMLK is participating in the work of the National Network of Popular Educators in 17 Cuban provinces and municipalities. Most of the network's members are women, according to María Isabel Romero, the coordinator of CMMLK's Popular Education and Participating in Local Experiences Programme. CMMLK also has connections with similar partners abroad, mainly in Latin America, and with social movements. The Cuban centre offers training and promotes Freire's approach for the work of civil society groups in Latin America, Vidal said.

Brazilian theologian Frei Betto contributed to introducing this educational perspective in Cuba, and has closely followed its development. At the meeting, Betto said he brought "this contribution to the (Cuban) Revolution, out of conviction of the political importance of Popular Education methodology."

Latin American activists like Messilene Gorete, of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST), Honduran activist Salvador Zúñiga of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation (COPINH), a member of the coalition of groups opposed to the June 2009 coup d'etat, and Dolores Iveth Velasco of Equipo Maíz, a Salvadoran political education group, also attended the meeting.

Velasco is part of an education project working with a wide range of groups in El Salvador. In her view, "Popular Education is that knowledge that we have and build on, but when we organise it, it frees us from the bonds created by the consumer society."

As a result of this liberating methodology, "a person takes up the reins of their own life," she said. According to her social work experience, it is vital to bring women to this kind of learning, so that they "take power over their own bodies and do not allow others to make decisions for them."

Vandana Shiva: Earth Democracy And Rights Of Mother Earth - Ending War Against Earth

2010-11-07T13:52:00.001-08:00

The richer we get, the poorer we become ecologically and culturally.
The growth of affluence, measured in money, is leading to a growth in poverty at the material, cultural, ecological and spiritual levels.

The real currency of life is life itself
we have a higher purpose, a higher end

''earth democracy'' enables us to envision and create living democracies based on the intrinsic worth of all species, all peoples, all cultures - a just and equal sharing of this earth's vital resources, and sharing the decisions about the use of the earth's resources.

Earth democracy protects the ecological processes that maintain life and the fundamental human rights that are the basis of the right to life, including the right to water, food, health, education, jobs and livelihoods.

obey ... Gaia's laws for maintenance of the earth's ecosystems and the diversity of its beings

nature's capacity to provide food and water is protected.

[Nurturing] the rights of Mother Earth is ... the most important human rights and social justice struggle.
It is the broadest peace movement of our times.
+++

Time to End War Against the Earth

by Vandana Shiva
Published on Sunday, November 7, 2010 by The Age (Australia)
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/11/07-5

When we think of wars in our times, our minds turn to Iraq and Afghanistan. But the bigger war is the war against the planet. This war has its roots in an economy that fails to respect ecological and ethical limits - limits to inequality, limits to injustice, limits to greed and economic concentration.

A handful of corporations and of powerful countries seeks to control the earth's resources and transform the planet into a supermarket in which everything is for sale. They want to sell our water, genes, cells, organs, knowledge, cultures and future.

The continuing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and onwards are not only about "blood for oil". As they unfold, we will see that they are about blood for food, blood for genes and biodiversity and blood for water.

The war mentality underlying military-industrial agriculture is evident from the names of Monsanto's herbicides - ''Round-Up'', ''Machete'', ''Lasso''. American Home Products, which has merged with Monsanto, gives its herbicides similarly aggressive names, including ''Pentagon'' and ''Squadron''.This is the language of war. Sustainability is based on peace with the earth.

The war against the earth begins in the mind. Violent thoughts shape violent actions. Violent categories construct violent tools. And nowhere is this more vivid than in the metaphors and methods on which industrial, agricultural and food production is based. Factories that produced poisons and explosives to kill people during wars were transformed into factories producing agri-chemicals after the wars.

The year 1984 woke me up to the fact that something was terribly wrong with the way food was produced. With the violence in Punjab and the disaster in Bhopal, agriculture looked like war. That is when I wrote The Violence of the Green Revolution and why I started Navdanya as a movement for an agriculture free of poisons and toxics.

Pesticides, which started as war chemicals, have failed to control pests. Genetic engineering was supposed to provide an alternative to toxic chemicals. Instead, it has led to increased use of pesticides and herbicides and unleashed a war against farmers.

The high-cost feeds and high-cost chemicals are trapping farmers in debt - and the debt trap is pushing farmers to suicide. According to official data, more than 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide in India since 1997.

Making peace with the earth was always an ethical and ecological imperative. It has now become a survival imperative for our species.

Violence to the soil, to biodiversity, to water, to atmosphere, to farms and farmers produces a warlike food system that is unable to feed people. One billion people are hungry. Two billion suffer food-related diseases - obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cancers.

There are three levels of violence involved in non-sustainable development. The first is the violence against the earth, which is expressed as the ecological crisis. The second is the violence against people, which is expressed as poverty, destitution and displacement. The third is the violence of war and conflict, as the powerful reach for the resources that lie in other communities and countries for their limitless appetites.

When every aspect of life is commercialized, living becomes more costly, and people are poor, even if they earn more than a dollar a day. On the other hand, people can be affluent in material terms, even without the money economy, if they have access to land, their soils are fertile, their rivers flow clean, their cultures are rich and carry traditions of producing beautiful homes and clothing and delicious food, and there is social cohesion, solidarity and spirit of community.

The elevation of the domain of the market, and money as man-made capital, to the position of the highest organizing principle for societies and the only measure of our well-being has led to the undermining of the processes that maintain and sustain life in nature and society.

The richer we get, the poorer we become ecologically and culturally. The growth of affluence, measured in money, is leading to a growth in poverty at the material, cultural, ecological and spiritual levels.

The real currency of life is life itself and this view raises questions: how do we look at ourselves in this world? What are humans for? And are we merely a money-making and resource-guzzling machine? Or do we have a higher purpose, a higher end?

I believe that ''earth democracy'' enables us to envision and create living democracies based on the intrinsic worth of all species, all peoples, all cultures - a just and equal sharing of this earth's vital resources, and sharing the decisions about the use of the earth's resources.

We have to make a choice. Will we obey the market laws of corporate greed or Gaia's laws for maintenance of the earth's ecosystems and the diversity of its beings?

People's need for food and water can be met only if nature's capacity to provide food and water is protected. Dead soils and dead rivers cannot give food and water.

Defending the rights of Mother Earth is therefore the most important human rights and social justice struggle. It is the broadest peace movement of our times.

This is an edited version of Dr Vandana Shiva's speech at the Sydney Opera House last night.

Vandana Shiva is an Indian feminist and environmental activist. She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology.

Child Gives Great Lecture - What's Wrong With Our Food System

2010-11-05T08:49:00.000-07:00

Nov 05, 2010

What's Wrong With Our Food System

Birke Baehr wants adults to know that while they might be oblivious for a while, once they are in the know kids are interested and concerned about what is happening to the American food system. They want to learn more about where the food they are eating is coming from, what they can do to make the system better, and what their choices are. Watch an articulate and upbeat Birke tell it like it is.

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Empathetic & Kind - Not Selfish & Cruel -- How Progressive Ideas Become Main Stream

2010-11-02T19:16:00.001-07:00

Empathetic & Kind - Not Selfish & Cruel
-- How Progressive Ideas Can Become Main Stream

we must lead this shift ourselves. People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them.

argue for the policies we want not on the grounds of expediency but
on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind;

and against others
on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel.

In asserting our values we become the change we want to see.
+++

The Values of Everything

Posted October 11, 2010
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/10/11/the-values-of-everything/

Progressive causes are failing: here’s how they could be turned around

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 12th October 2010

So here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting.

The acceptance of policies which counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st Century. In the United States, blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires should pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?

The answer, I think, is provided by the most interesting report I have read this year. Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology(1). It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight which now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.

Progressives, he shows, have been suckers for a myth of human cognition he labels the Enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires.

A host of psychological experiments demonstrates that it doesn’t work like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information which confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change.

Our social identity is shaped by values which psychologists classify as either extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic values concern status and self-advancement. People with a strong set of extrinsic values fixate on how others see them. They cherish financial success, image and fame. Intrinsic values concern relationships with friends, family and community, and self-acceptance. Those who have a strong set of intrinsic values are not dependent on praise or rewards from other people. They have beliefs which transcend their self-interest.

Few people are all-extrinsic or all-intrinsic. Our social identity is formed by a mixture of values. But psychological tests in nearly 70 countries show that values cluster together in remarkably consistent patterns. Those who strongly value financial success, for example, have less empathy, stronger manipulative tendencies, a stronger attraction to hierarchy and inequality, stronger prejudices towards strangers and less concern about human rights and the environment. Those who have a strong sense of self-acceptance have more empathy and a greater concern about human rights, social justice and the environment. These values suppress each other: the stronger someone’s extrinsic aspirations, the weaker his or her intrinsic goals.

We are not born with our values. They are shaped by the social environment. By changing our perception of what is normal and acceptable, politics alters our minds as much as our circumstances. Free, universal health provision, for example, tends to reinforce intrinsic values. Shutting the poor out of healthcare normalises inequality, reinforcing extrinsic values. The sharp rightward shift which began with Margaret Thatcher and persisted under Blair and Brown, all of whose governments emphasised the virtues of competition, the market and financial success, has changed our values. The British Social Attitudes survey, for example, shows a sharp fall over this period in public support for policies which redistribute wealth and opportunity(2).

This shift has been reinforced by advertising and the media. The media’s fascination with power politics, its rich lists, its catalogues of the 100 most powerful, influential, intelligent or beautiful people, its obsessive promotion of celebrity, fashion, fast cars, expensive holidays: all these inculcate extrinsic values. By generating feelings of insecurity and inadequacy - which means reducing self-acceptance - they also suppress intrinsic goals.

Advertisers, who employ large numbers of psychologists, are well aware of this. Crompton quotes Guy Murphy, global planning director for the marketing company JWT. Marketers, Murphy says, “should see themselves as trying to manipulate culture; being social engineers, not brand managers; manipulating cultural forces, not brand impressions”(3). The more they foster extrinsic values, the easier it is to sell their products.

Rightwing politicians have also, instinctively, understood the importance of values in changing the political map. Margaret Thatcher famously remarked that “economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”(4) Conservatives in the United States generally avoid debating facts and figures. Instead they frame issues in ways that both appeal to and reinforce extrinsic values. Every year, through mechanisms that are rarely visible and seldom discussed, the space in which progressive ideas can flourish shrinks a little more. The progressive response to this trend has been disastrous.

Instead of confronting the shift in values, we have sought to adapt to it. Once-progressive political parties have tried to appease altered public attitudes: think of all those New Labour appeals to Middle England, which was often just a code for self-interest. In doing so they endorse and legitimise extrinsic values. Many greens and social justice campaigners have also tried to reach people by appealing to self-interest: explaining how, for example, relieving poverty in the developing world will build a market for British products, or suggesting that, by buying a hybrid car, you can impress your friends and enhance your social status. This tactic also strengthens extrinsic values, making future campaigns even less likely to succeed. Green consumerism has been a catastrophic mistake.

Common Cause proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Progressive campaigners, it suggests, should help to foster an understanding of the psychology which informs political change and show how it has been manipulated. They should also come together to challenge forces – particularly the advertising industry – which make us insecure and selfish.

Ed Miliband appears to understands this need. He told the Labour conference that he “wants to change our society so that it values community and family, not just work” and “wants to change our foreign policy so that it’s always based on values, not just alliances … We must shed old thinking and stand up for those who believe there is more to life than the bottom line.”(5) But there’s a paradox here, which means that we cannot rely on politicians to drive these changes. Those who succeed in politics are, by definition, people who prioritise extrinsic values. Their ambition must supplant peace of mind, family life, friendship - even brotherly love.

So we must lead this shift ourselves. People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel. In asserting our values we become the change we want to see.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Tom Crompton, September 2010. Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values.
WWF, Oxfam, Friends of the Earth, CPRE, Climate Outreach Information Network. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf

2. J. Curtice, 2010. Thermostat or weathervane? Public reactions to spending and redistribution under New Labour, in Park, A et al, S (eds.) British Social Attitudes 2009-2010: the 26th report. Sage, London. Cited by Tom Crompton, above.

3. Guy Murphy, 2005. Influencing the size of your market. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. Cited by Tom Crompton, above.

4. Margaret Thatcher, 3rd May 198. Interview with The Sunday Times. Cited by Tom Crompton, above.

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/sep/28/ed-miliband-labour-conference-speech

Storks Return As Community Eliminates Pesticides & Restores Habitats

2010-11-01T08:57:00.001-07:00

Inaba became a community leader, determined to "live with the storks"

"I want to pass on the landscape that I saw as a child," said Inaba.
"I hope our efforts here will spread to the rest of the country."

Inaba and other farmers studied how to grow rice without pesticides.

rebuilt waterways and flooded some rice fields for longer or all year-round to bring back fish and frogs that are food sources for the storks.

"When I learnt that frogs eat noxious insects, I was very moved.
I said to myself 'we can do farming without pesticides',"

the local habitats ... recovered,

Now, about 50 storks live in local wetlands and fields and 100 in a public park in Toyooka, a fact that the city proudly promotes to attract tourists.

The birds have become the emblem of the local brand of "Stork-Nurturing Rice", popular with ecologically-minded consumers who can order it online.

Inaba said growing organic rice is more challenging than it was when farmers doused fields in pesticides, but said he was determined never to go back.

"satoyama", a composite of the words for villages (sato) and mountains, woods and grasslands (yama).

Japan is seeking to sign up groups and countries to exchange conservation lessons and ideas through its Satoyama Initiative.
===

Japan Looks to Ancient Village Wisdom to Save Biodiversity

Published on Monday, November 1, 2010 by Agence France Presse
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/01-0

Four decades ago the oriental white stork became extinct in Japan, the victim of rapid industrialisation and modern farm practices and heavy pesticide use that destroyed its habitat.

As Japan hosts a UN conference on biodiversity this week, the high-tech nation is pushing the initiative to promote some of its ancient village wisdom as a way to heal battered environments worldwide. (photo by Flickr user pelican)

Today, the graceful migratory bird soars again over restored wetlands around the small town of Toyooka in western Japan, now a showcase for an ambitious conservation effort called the Satoyama Initiative.

The initiative draws lessons from before Japan became studded with megacities and crisscrossed by bullet train lines, when most people lived in villages near rice paddies, bamboo groves and forests.

In the pre-industrial age, woodlands gave villagers plants, nuts, mushrooms and wildlife as well as natural medicines, textiles, fuel and timber for building, all usually harvested sustainably over the centuries.

These managed ecosystems - neither pristine wilderness nor cultivated agricultural landscapes - are known as "satoyama", a composite of the words for villages (sato) and mountains, woods and grasslands (yama).

Today ecologists, somewhat less poetically, call them "socio-ecological production landscapes".

At the 193-member UN meeting in Nagoya aimed at stemming the loss of plant and animal species, Japan is seeking to sign up groups and countries to exchange conservation lessons and ideas through its Satoyama Initiative.

In Japan, as elsewhere, these human-influenced natural environments have been on the decline as many forests have vanished, agriculture has become modernised, and small farm villages have been abandoned.

Bucking the trend has been Toyooka, a town of about 90,000 people in the west of Honshu island, which prides itself on undoing much of the past damage that had wiped out the oriental white stork.

The bird, which has a wingspan of two metres and is officially designated a national treasure in Japan, became extinct in the country in 1971.

Local farmer Tetsuro Inaba, 68, remembers how when he was a child the birds were still a common sight across the country, before they slowly vanished, with the heavy use of pesticides delivering the final blow.

"When I took over the farm from my father, the farmers here were addicted to pesticides. In hindsight, we used terrifying amounts," he said.

When wild stork numbers in Toyooka fell to just 12 in 1965, the city caught a pair and started an artificial breeding programme. But the conservation attempt failed. And the rest died out in the wild by 1971.

"They had lost their reproductive capacity because of the mercury that had accumulated inside their bodies from pesticides," says Inaba.

In 1992, Inaba became a community leader, determined to "live with the storks" - a species that survived in parts of Russia, China and Korea.

Inaba and other farmers studied how to grow rice without pesticides.

They also rebuilt waterways and flooded some rice fields for longer or all year-round to bring back fish and frogs that are food sources for the storks.

"When I learnt that frogs eat noxious insects, I was very moved. I said to myself 'we can do farming without pesticides'," said Inaba.

As the local habitats slowly recovered, Toyooka released storks into the wild five years ago. They had been bred in captivity from six young birds donated by Russia's far-eastern city of Khabarovsk two decades earlier.

Now, about 50 storks live in local wetlands and fields and 100 in a public park in Toyooka, a fact that the city proudly promotes to attract tourists.

The birds have become the emblem of the local brand of "Stork-Nurturing Rice", popular with ecologically-minded consumers who can order it online.

Inaba said growing organic rice is more challenging than it was when farmers doused fields in pesticides, but said he was determined never to go back.

"I want to pass on the landscape that I saw as a child," said Inaba. "I hope our efforts here will spread to the rest of the country."

Flex Muscle To Make Better Choices - Over Rides Compulsive Choices

2010-10-29T21:09:00.000-07:00

tighten ... muscles, regardless of which muscles ... tightened -- hand, finger, calf, or biceps -- ... greater ability to make better choices
muscle tightening specifically helped when the choice aligned with the participants' goals.
tightening of muscles only helped at the moment people faced the ... dilemma [Over Rides Compulsive Choices]

Medical science discovers remarkable yet simple way to instantly increase your willpower

Thursday, October 28, 2010 by: S. L. Baker, features writer
http://www.naturalnews.com/030208_willpower_mind-body_medicine.html

(NaturalNews) Here's good news that's just in time to help you avoid the temptation of sugary goodies served up at holiday parties. If you feel your willpower weakening as you pass the desserts piled high, just tighten up your muscles -- flex any of them, including your finger or calf muscles. Sound crazy? Not according to new research. Scientists have found that firming muscles literally shores up self-control.

Researchers Iris W. Hung of the National University of Singapore and Aparna A. Labroo of the University of Chicago collaborated on a study that put volunteers through a range of self-control dilemmas revolving around accepting immediate pain for long-term gain. For example, in one study participants held their hands in an ice bucket to demonstrate pain resistance and, in another, the research subjects had to drink a healthy but awful-tasting vinegar drink.

In yet another experiment, study participants decided whether they could look at disturbing information about injured children devastated by the earthquake in Haiti and donate money to help. And in a final study, the volunteers were observed while making food choices for lunch at a local cafeteria to see if tightening muscles helped them overcome picking tempting but not-good-for-them foods.

"Participants who were instructed to tighten their muscles, regardless of which muscles they tightened -- hand, finger, calf, or biceps -- while trying to exert self-control demonstrated greater ability to withstand the pain, consume the unpleasant medicine, attend to the immediately disturbing but essential information, or overcome tempting foods," the authors concluded in their paper, which was just published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The researchers found that the muscle tightening specifically helped when the choice aligned with the participants' goals. For example, if a person didn't want to eat healthy foods, tightening their muscles wouldn't keep them from chowing down on sugary junk. Hung and Labroo also found that the tightening of muscles only helped at the moment people faced the self-control dilemma. In other words, tightening your muscles before faced with a plate of sugar cookies doesn't work but tightening your muscles when the cookies are in front of you seems to.

Bottom line: the research is a new example of the connection between the body and the mind. "We draw on theories of embodied cognition to explain our results, and we add to that literature by showing for the first time that one's body can help firm willpower and facilitate the self-regulation essential for the attainment of long-term goals...The mind and the body are so closely tied together, merely clenching muscles can also activate willpower," the authors stated in their paper. "Thus simply engaging in these bodily actions, which often result from an exertion of willpower, can serve as a non-conscious source to recruit willpower, facilitate self-control, and improve consumer will."

For more information:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/do...

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Robert Fisk: The Shaming of America - USA Disgraceful Deceit & Brutality In The Iraq War

2010-10-24T21:41:00.001-07:00

The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.
===

The Shaming of America

Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US

by Robert Fisk
Published on Sunday, October 24, 2010 by the Independent/UK

As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.

Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general - the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind - to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."

Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints - I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain - and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of undisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.

It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.

But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 - I loved the "81" bit - is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?

The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.

The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report - heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.

Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.

But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practice? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?

We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts - almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation - "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."

The significance of this remark - cryptically sadistic in its way - was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.

So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus - widely loved by the US press corps - was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 - wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? - to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.

US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing

WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:

Prisoners abused, raped and murdered

Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemized in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.

Civilian death toll cover-up

Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.

The shooting of men trying to surrender

In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."

Private security firm abuses

Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.

Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing

A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.

Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints

Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.

Iranian influence

Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

How to opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners at the airpor

2010-10-20T07:23:00.000-07:00

How to opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners at the airport

(NaturalNews) I encountered my first airport naked body scanner while flying out of California today, and of course I decided to "opt out" of the scan. You do this by telling the blue-shirted TSA agents that you simply wish to opt out of the body scanner. Here's what happened after that:

A TSA agent told me to step to the side and stay put. He then proceeded to shout out loudly enough for all the other travelers and TSA agents to hear, "OPT OUT! OPT OUT!" This is no doubt designed to attract attention (or perhaps humiliation) to those who choose to opt out of the naked body scanner. I saw no purpose for this verbal alert because the same TSA agent who was yelling this ultimately was the one who patted me down anyway.

For the pat down, first I was required to walk through the regular metal detector. From there, I was asked if I wanted to be patted down in a private room, or if I didn't mind just being patted down in full view of everyone else. Not being a shy person in the first place, I told the agent I didn't need a private room.

He then explained to me that he was going to pat down my entire body, including my crotch and my buttocks, but that he would use the back of his hands to pat down the crotch and buttocks areas. This is probably designed to make the pat-down seem less "personal" and more detached. That way, air passengers can't complain of being felt up by TSA agents who might get carried away with the pat-down procedure. He asked if it hurt for me to be touched anywhere, and I told him no, at which point he proceeded with the pat down.

It was a well-scripted pat-down, covering all the areas of my body, including a mild crotch sweep (it wasn't especially invasive or anything, as doctors will do far worse during a physical exam). He swept my arms, legs, hips, back of the neck, ankles and everywhere else. To the TSA's credit, this guy was fast, efficient and only used a light touch that was in no way disturbing. But it did take an extra five minutes or so compared to walking through the naked body scanner.

Speaking of the naked body scanners, as I was having my crotch swept by the back of the hand of this TSA agent, I was observing other air travelers subjecting themselves to the naked body scanners. They were told to walk into the body scanner staging area and then hold their arms in the air in a pose as if they were under arrest. They were told to freeze in this position for several seconds (perhaps 10 seconds) during which they were being blasted with ionizing radiation that we all know contributes to cancer.

The TSA, of course, will tell you that these machines can't possibly contribute to cancer. But they said the same thing about mammograms, and we now know that mammograms are so harmful to women's health that they actually harm ten women for everyone one woman they help (http://www.naturalnews.com/020829.html). So I'm not exactly taking the U.S. government at its word that naked body scanner radiation is "harmless."

As these air travelers were being scanned, their naked body images were appearing on a screen somewhere, of course. Some TSA agent was examining the naked body shape and contours of all these people, and even though we were told by the TSA that the image viewing machines cannot store images, we have since learned that the machines actually do have the capability to store those images (http://www.naturalnews.com/029378_f...). In addition, rogue TSA employees could simply use their cell phones to take snapshots of what they see on the screen. There are no doubt rules against such behavior, but it's bound to happen sooner or later.

Meanwhile, my own security screening was proceeding fully clothed. I don't want to broadcast my naked butt cheeks on the TSA's graphic monitors, thank you very much!

Very few people opt out of the naked body scanners

The most fascinating part about this entire process was not the verbal broadcast of my opt out status, nor having my crotch swept by the latex-covered back hand of some anonymous TSA agent, but rather the curious fact that I was the only one opting out. Although I must have watched at least a hundred people go through this particular security checkpoint, there wasn't a single other person who opted out of the naked body scan.

They all just lined up like cattle to have their bodies scanned with ionizing radiation.

To me, that's just fascinating. That when people are given a choice to opt out of being irradiated, they will choose to just go along with the naked body scan rather than risk standing out by requesting to opt out.

You see, I'm not convinced that the TSA's naked body scanners enhance air travel security at all. Previous security tests conducted by the FAA show quite clearly that the greatest threat to airplane safety isn't from the passengers but from ground crews, where bombs and other materials can be quite easily smuggled onto planes.

But even though naked body scanners may not enhance air travel security, they do accomplish something far more intriguing: The successful completion of an experiment in human behavior. If you were to pose the question "Will people line up like cattle to be electronically undressed in front of government security officers?" The answer is now unequivocally YES!

Most people, it turns out, will simply do whatever they're told by government authorities, even if it means giving up their privacy or their freedoms. Almost anything can be sold to the public under the guise of "fighting terrorism" these days, including subjecting your body to what is essentially a low-radiation CT scan at the airport!

I don't know about you, but I don't think I should be required to subject myself to ionizing radiation as a condition of air travel security. Of course, the more technically minded readers among you might counter by saying that high-altitude travel is, all by itself, an event that subjects you to low levels of ionizing radiation (which is true). But that's all the more reason to not add the body's radiation burden any more than necessary. Americans already get far too much radiation from CT scans and other medical imaging tests (not to mention mammograms). Do we really need to dose peoples' bodies with yet more radiation every time they board an airplane?

Trusted traveler program?

I don't know why the TSA never pursued its "trusted traveler" program. I actually suggested this years ago, and there was word that the TSA was working on something similar. The way it worked was very different from the current system. Under the current system, every person entering an airport security line is assumed to be a terrorist, and it is only through the various security screenings that you are eventually deemed to be innocent. This is a "guilty until proven innocent" approach to air security, and it's the system in place all across America (and around the world) today.

Under a trusted traveler program, people who pass rigorous background screening procedures, criminal history checks and other similar tests would be assumed innocent unless suspected of being guilty. They might carry "trusted traveler" cards linked to a federal database so that their status could be verified as they pass through a security checkpoint. They might even have their fingerprint scanned at that checkpoint in order to biometrically verify their identity.

For whatever reason, the TSA is no longer pursuing any such trusted traveler program (at least not to my knowledge). Perhaps the agency just figures it can trust no one. Hence the need to have everybody line up in front of the naked body scanner machines and raise their arms in a humiliating "I'm being arrested" pose.

It's actually just like the scene from the movie called The Fifth Element starring Bruce Willis. Remember the scene where the cops are searching the apartment block and they use an X-ray scanner to see through the walls? As they search the apartment building, they announce that all residents must face the wall and place their hands inside the yellow circles on the wall. This scene eerily resembles what the TSA makes U.S. travelers do right now.

And virtually no one protests. That's the really amazing part about this.

Seasonal flu shots offered at the airport, too

After completing my security pat-down, by the way, I entered the terminal where I walked by a kiosk offering a seasonal flu shot. There was a big sign claiming that the flu shot would prevent you from catching the flu, and a nurse of some sort stood right behind the kiosk, ready to inject you with a vaccine for just $35.

First the naked body scanners, and then the flu shot propaganda. It reminded me that the U.S. government really is trying to push people into self-destructive behaviors that will ultimately benefit the sick-care industry. After all, the more cancer and Alzheimer's disease people develop (from radiation and vaccines, of course), the more business gets generated for Big Pharma.

I know enough about health and freedom to avoid these little disease bombs, but most Americans don't know enough to resist the propaganda. They just allow themselves to be irradiated, injected and poisoned, and they think it's all okay because the government tells them it's good for them.

It's odd that people trust the government when the government doesn't trust them at all. If the government treats you like a criminal, a terrorist, a lab rat and a vaccine depository, doesn't that only prove they don't honor you as a sovereign individual?

And that sends a powerful message confirming that the U.S. government has forgotten it is supposed to serve the People, not rule over them.

Just wait and watch how this gets even worse. Today, you can opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners, but after a year or two -- once the sheeple get comfortable with giving up all their freedoms -- these scans will become mandatory. That's the day I give up air travel for good.

Gee, I sure will miss having my crotch swept by the latex-covered back hand of some anonymous TSA agent who's wasting taxpayer money by treating me like a terrorist.

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Spiritual Strength - Without Racing Mind's Over Sensitivity To Little Things

2010-10-19T07:15:00.001-07:00

Not Enough Time? Try Doing Nothing

A racing mind that reacts sensitively to little things indicates thinking that has lost its spiritual strength. Meditation restores that power. --Anonymous

Tip of the Day:
I thought I took my bike on a ride through New York City's Central Park. But really? My bike took me on one. My experience changed many times as external forces determined my mood. Happiness anticipating a great ride, frustration imagining it would be ruined by the race, relief when it wasn't, fear when people ran in front of me, fear again, followed by guilt and self-criticism, when my distraction nearly led to a crash. All in the course of a few short minutes. Which is how most of us go through our day. An angry comment puts us in a bad mood; an unexpected compliment cheers us up. It all matters, which is why the smallest comment can unhinge us. The solution, though, is simple. All we have to do is nothing. The trick: do it regularly, at least a few minutes a day. [ more ]

Be The Change:
Practice "doing nothing" as this article suggests, in response to situations that would ordinarily push your buttons, and by sitting in silence for 5 minutes each day.

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John Pilger: The Fifth Estate: Breaking the great silence

2010-10-15T20:31:00.001-07:00

Excerpts from the end of John Pilger's speech:
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555

5 Nov 2009

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".

You can watch the full speech below with an introduction by Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees. Stuart Rees. Director, Sydney Peace Foundation.
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555
...

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many - they are few.

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place; the major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main ... parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words.

Tom Paine didn’t have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an ... [global] ... glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice: to which I would add disobedience.

It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilized and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

“The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

... we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

...

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we ... speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

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John Pilger: Breaking the great Australian silence

2010-10-15T19:56:00.001-07:00

Breaking the great Australian silence

See the aricle and watch John's speech:
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555

5 Nov 2009

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".

You can watch the full speech below with an introduction by Professor Emeritus Stuart Rees. Stuart Rees. Director, Sydney Peace Foundation.
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=555

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother.

She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sand hills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, whom Charlie described to me as a queen of the Aranda people, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. Hetti wore a big black hat and sat in the front of our rented Ford Falcon. She suggested we smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda - “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next war?

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere - from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country - unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the riske thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the class and power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia... a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”.

Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor edited by Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies - are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East. Only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister of Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken rule, this impunity, attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we?

Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.”

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? - because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence - to no longer “look from the side” in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this -- as they do to black Australians, almost every day – Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore suburbs; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.” He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. The Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away... in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”.

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are?

Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good on Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many - they are few.

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place; the major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words.

Tom Paine didn’t have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice: to which I would add disobedience.

It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness; the revelation of a seed beneath the snow.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

“The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, Australia has become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect, and our legacy to the next generation, is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

Video of the Week: Children of the Trains

2010-10-08T07:08:00.001-07:00

Oct 08, 2010

Children of the Trains

There are more than 10,000 street children in Thailand; for most of them the streets are often a safer place than their homes.

The Library Train began as one man's efforts to care for a few of Bangkok's street children. Now it is a collective volunteer effort by the Thai railway police to serve, protect, shelter, and educate the many homeless children living in the streets and slums of Bangkok.

KarmaTube is a repository of inspiring online videos coupled with small, be-the-change actions that everyone can engage in. Our weekly videos reach 32752 active subscribers. Thank you for your partnership in service.

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BWN - Health v5

2010-10-08T07:06:00.001-07:00

Oct 08, 2010

Children of the Trains

There are more than 10,000 street children in Thailand; for most of them the streets are often a safer place than their homes.

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Commercial Targeting McDonald’s Goes Viral

2010-10-06T12:33:00.001-07:00

http://www.pcrm.org/newsletter/oct10/mcdonalds.html

Over 1 Million Served: PCRM's Commercial Targeting McDonald's Goes Viral
PCRM's new "Consequences" ad, which takes aim at McDonald's high-fat menu, racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube in just days last month. The provocative ad was also covered by newspapers and broadcast media across the world, including The Wall Street Journal, U.K.'s The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and hundreds of other media outlets from Germany to China. Watch Ad >

Over 1 Million Served: PCRM's Commercial Targeting McDonald's Goes Viral

PCRM's new "Consequences" ad, which takes aim at McDonald's high-fat menu, racked up more than 1 million views on YouTube in just days last month. The provocative ad was also covered by newspapers and broadcast media across the world, including The Wall Street Journal, U.K.'s The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, and hundreds of other media outlets from Germany to China.

"Our nation's addiction to Big Macs and other high-fat fast food is literally breaking our hearts," says Susan Levin, M.S., R.D., PCRM's nutrition education director. "PCRM's commercial tackles heart disease head-on by educating millions of people about the dangers of fast food."

How unhealthy is the McDonald's menu? The world's largest fast-food chain serves a long list of high-fat, high-cholesterol items and offers almost no healthful choices. Even many McDonald's items that consumers may believe are healthful—salads, for example—are generally high in calories, fat, and sodium.

The Big Mac, the chain's signature sandwich, packs a walloping 540 calories and 29 grams of fat—but it is hardly the most unhealthful item on the menu. Here are five McDonald's menu items with more fat and calories than a Big Mac:

Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese: 42 grams of fat, 740 calories, 155 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,380 milligrams of sodium
Angus Bacon and Cheese: 39 grams of fat, 790 calories, 145 milligrams of cholesterol, 2,070 milligrams of sodium
Sausage Biscuit with Egg (Large Size Biscuit): 37 grams of fat, 570 calories, 250 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,280 milligrams of sodium
Premium Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken and Ranch Dressing: 35 grams of fat, 600 calories, 75 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,450 milligrams of sodium
McSkillet Burrito with Sausage: 36 grams of fat, 610 calories, 410 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,390 milligrams of sodium

Studies, including one from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, show that people who consume fast food are at a higher risk of obesity, a key risk factor for heart disease. Regular consumption of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods increases the risk of heart disease, and studies have found that even a single fatty meal can raise blood pressure, stiffen major arteries, and cause the heart to beat harder.

The commercial will air in fast-food addicted cities with high rates of heart disease over the following months.

To read more about the dangers of fast food, visit PCRM.org/Health.

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Chris Hedges: March to Nowhere - Refused To Confront Corporate Structures Of Power

2010-10-05T14:31:00.001-07:00

No rally, no positive message, no effort to expose the idiocies of those arrayed against us will work until we restore to the political process mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can be heard.

the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.”

The One Nation March in Washington, which lacked moral and political courage,
did nothing to educate or rally our most important constituency

—those out of work, those being foreclosed, those without hope.

It refused to confront the real, corporate structures of power.
It refused to disown Barack Obama and the Democrats.
===

March to Nowhere

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/march_to_nowhere_20101005/

Posted on Oct 5, 2010

By Chris Hedges

We can hold One Nation marches every week. It will not make any difference until we revolt against the formal structures of power.

The liberal preoccupation with positive forms of propaganda ignores the root of our problem. The tea party and hate mongers on Fox such as Glenn Beck, however repugnant, are the manifestation of the crisis, not its cause. The forces assaulting the remnants of American democracy will not be cowed or discredited with rallies, such as the one in Washington on Saturday. We will blunt these rising anti-democratic forces only when we organize outside conventional systems of power. It means dismantling the permanent war economy and the corporate state. It means an end to foreclosures and bank repossessions. It means a functional health care system for all Americans. It means taking care of our poor and unemployed. And it means a system of government that is freed from corporate interests.

Mass support for anti-democratic movements and public acceptance of open violations of human rights are not caused, in the end, by the skillful dissemination of misinformation or brainwashing. They are caused by the breakdown of a society and the death of a liberal class that once made reform and representative government possible. The timidity of our liberal class was on public display during the march in Washington. Speakers may have called for jobs, but none would call on citizens to abandon the rotting hull of the Democratic Party and our moribund political system or put Wall Street speculators in prison. The speakers at the rally proposed working within the current electoral system, although most Americans are aware that it has been gamed by corporate interests. This is hardly a call, especially given the failures of the Obama administration, that will fire up the unemployed and underemployed.

“We need jobs,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said at the march. “We’ve bailed out the banks. We bailed out the insurance companies. Now it’s time to bail out the American people.”

But Sharpton and the other speakers, too close to the power elite in the Democratic Party, did not call for rebellion. There was no war cry against Wall Street and the purveyors of death in the defense and health industry. There was no acknowledgement that unfettered capitalism and globalization are killing our ecosystem and creating a worldwide system of neo-feudalism. There was no acceptance that the corporate state must be dismantled if we are to save ourselves. Any effective resistance must begin with a condemnation of our political elite and liberal institutions, including the press, the universities, labor, the arts, religious institutions and the Democratic Party, for selling us out. But the speakers on the mall in Washington would not go there. And I suspect, for this reason, the Americans who are hurting most found nothing they said of interest.

All totalitarian movements, even those that are openly criminal, succeed because they have widespread mass support. They are the expression of a yearning that sweeps through a nation that has been convulsed by economic dislocation, a loss of hope and flagrant political corruption. And in these times of lament and deprivation the absurdities, crimes and excesses of reactionary forces do not matter. It wasn’t hard to find out what Slobodan Milosevic was doing in Bosnia. It wasn’t hard in Nazi Germany to hear about the widespread massacres of Jews in Poland. It is not a secret to most Americans that Muslim detainees, held for years without charges, are tortured in black sites around the world. The murder of tens of thousands of civilians by our forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is tacitly acknowledged by the public as the price of war. The massive human suffering in the open-air prison that is Gaza is not a mystery. We know what happens to the millions of undocumented workers who live as stateless citizens among us and have become a kind of modern day slave labor force.

The rising proto-fascist movement in America is caused by a hatred and alienation so profound that the crimes of the state, along with the buffoonish antics of those who defend and champion these crimes, do not matter. We will not discredit the right-wing with facts, a demand for a respect of law or rational discussion. Propaganda or counter messages of tolerance are not the issue. The issue is societal collapse. This issue is a corporate state that has carried out a coup d’etat. The issue is the rupture of all mechanisms within the political process to protect citizens from accelerating impoverishment, internal control and corporate abuse. Those who refuse to acknowledge this bleak reality cannot offer solutions.

The right-wing propagandists have not created the problem. They have tapped into the moral void that has left tens of millions of Americans yearning for a profound and radical change. And if torture, war, racist attacks on immigrants, gays and Muslims, along with increased repression against internal dissidents, is the price for moral and economic renewal, many Americans are ready to sign on. If those who lead this rising proto-fascist movement insist on a Christian nation, teach creationism and believe in the physical existence of Satan, many Americans will sign on for this too. Hatred, when mobilized, is a very effective political force. And hatred, including the hatred for a liberal class that abandoned the working class, is what we face.

The decimation of our working class through outsourcing and globalization dynamited two of the most important props of the democratic system—class consciousness and class conflict. This has left traditional political parties, which once represented differing class interests, with nothing to offer the public beyond fringe issues such as abortion or gay marriage. Those in the liberal class who cling to the corpse of the Democratic Party do so not because they believe in the policies of the party—it does not differ in any significant way from the Republican Party—but because they hope against hope that the party will somehow restore itself to its former position as a defender of liberal values and the working class interests. It is the politics of nostalgia.

Our political theater has orphaned citizens who once looked to political parties to express and defend their interests. It has engendered apathy toward traditional social and political structures and an inchoate rage. This mixture of apathy and rage is a volatile cocktail. It finds its expression outside normal systems of dissent and in leaders who, in times of prosperity and stability, would be dismissed as lunatics.

No rally, no positive message, no effort to expose the idiocies of those arrayed against us will work until we restore to the political process mechanisms by which ordinary citizens can be heard. Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” cites the collapse of traditional political mechanisms, which now plagues us, as the opening needed for all totalitarian movements:

“The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.”

The One Nation March in Washington, which lacked moral and political courage, did nothing to educate or rally our most important constituency—those out of work, those being foreclosed, those without hope. It refused to confront the real, corporate structures of power. It refused to disown Barack Obama and the Democrats. And in the end it only confirmed what those who hate us think of liberals.

AP / J. Scott Applewhite

Activists gather at the Lincoln Memorial to participate in the “One Nation Working Together” rally to promote job creation, diversity and tolerance.

Doctor Sets Up Successful Organic Food Market Outside Hospital

2010-10-03T09:35:00.001-07:00

a widespread interest in food and healthy eating among his peers.

“This is a generation that cares a lot more and knows a lot more about the importance of diet,” he said. “We need a system that educates physicians about nutrition, and we’re the ones who are going to have to fight for it.”

The sheer scale of Kaiser, which holds farmers’ markets at 30 sites, makes changing the way food is bought a challenge, but also an opportunity.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,”

“It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain,” he said. “We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.”

a regional growers’ cooperative

putting some of Kaiser’s undeveloped land into agriculture.

“As someone who relies on evidence-based medicine, it bothers me that we don’t have clear metrics to guide these food-related initiatives,” he said. “But for now, I remind myself of the enduring value of another care-giving principle: common sense.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/dining/22doctors.html?pagewanted=all

Doctor’s Orders: Eat Well to Be Well

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Dr. Preston Maring, left, who began a farmers’ market at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, with his son, Ben.

By KATRINA HERON

Published: September 21, 2010
OAKLAND, Calif.

DR. PRESTON MARING was striding along a hospital corridor at double speed on a recent Friday morning, his tall frame, white hair and frequent gesticulations prompting waves of greetings from colleagues, who also took care to sidestep his forward momentum. His destination was the weekly farmers’ market he started in 2003, just outside the front door at the Kaiser Permanente medical center here.

“Since it’s mine, I made the rules — all organic,” he said as he skimmed by a line of stalls where fresh fruits and vegetables are sold to hospital workers, passers-by and even, he said, those bringing patients to the emergency room.

Dr. Maring, 64, a gynecologist and obstetrician with three decades as a surgeon, is well known as a former physician in chief at the hospital, the man who spearheaded the creation of its new pediatric neurosurgery unit.

But increasingly, his reputation and perpetual motion revolve around his conviction that in the health professions, the kitchen must become as crucial as the clinic. Food is at the center of health and illness, he argues, and so doctors must make all aspects of it — growing, buying, cooking, eating — a mainstay of their medical educations, their personal lives and their practices.

Though Dr. Maring blithely refers to himself as “that food nut around the hospital,” he is serious about the role he believes doctors should play in creating awareness of healthy food choices. To that end, he has worked to obtain fresh local food for hospital trays and in cafeterias. He began a Web site and blog that offers recipes and advice on meal planning and budgeting. He spent the summer working on a series of three-minute Web videos to explain the basics of shopping for healthful foods and efficient preparation techniques.

He also created a kind of culinary road show, which regularly takes him to health care institutions around the country, toting a PowerPoint presentation, a couple of plastic vegetable knives (“one of the great technological breakthroughs”), some salad ingredients and the makings of a vinaigrette.

“I like to put doctors on the spot,” he said, referring to his penchant for hauling a senior clinician up to the front of the room to chop vegetables with him. “We tend to be exalted, and I want to show the staffs that many of us don’t know how to mince garlic.”

If there was ever a time when doctors need to be as handy with a peeling knife as they are with a scalpel, this may be it. The draft version of the federal government’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines, which will be formally released in December, identifies obesity as the nation’s greatest public-health threat. It also notes the relationship of fast food (and physical inactivity) to unhealthy weight gain and emphasizes the importance of plant-based foods in the diet.

Despite evidence that doctors have a greater life expectancy than average, they don’t necessarily look after their own dietary health, said Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. “You’ll have a pretty hard time these days finding a doctor who smokes, but not nearly as hard a time finding one who eats terrible food.” He recalled a major breakfast gathering he attended several years ago: “I came in a bit late and was struck by the surreal image of senior scientists feeding on junk while discussing solutions to national nutritional problems.“

Dr. Willett cited surveys showing that during examinations of obese patients, doctors often don’t remark on overweight as a health issue. “Many of them just avoid it,” he said, either because they doubt their counsel will be heeded or because they don’t know the issues well enough themselves, leading the patient to underestimate the gravity of the situation.

For many doctors, an uneasy relationship with nutrition starts as early as medical school. Long hours and ready access to fast food, often on the hospital grounds, tends to undermine students’ best dietary intentions, said Dr. Robert F. Kushner, a professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, where he directs the Center for Lifestyle Medicine. “Even the ones who come in excited about eating well and exercise find that good habits are harder and harder to maintain as time goes on,” Dr. Kushner said.

Dr. Maring’s son, Ben, 30, a fourth-year medical student at New York University School of Medicine, hopes to change that. Mr. Maring has developed a series of cooking classes that incorporate salient aspects of nutrition and clinical medicine. He named his scheme CHEF — for Cook Healthy, Eat Fresh.

In 2009, he began lugging duffel bags filled with cooking implements and ingredients from his Brooklyn apartment to the medical school campus on East 31st Street in Manhattan, where he commandeered a spare lounge and taught fellow students simple preparation techniques, introduced guest speakers in specialties like diabetes and endocrinology, and handed out reams of recipes.

“I thought it was important for medical students to learn how to cook and eat well,” he said. “I also thought it was important for us to walk the walk when it comes to counseling patients about the importance of diet. We get so little training in nutrition that I wanted to provide some basic knowledge.”

Dr. Maring said: “You should have seen him trying to drag a convection oven into a taxicab. We cooked together as a family when he was a kid, but he blew past me a long time ago. Now I’m his sous-chef.”

Ben Maring, who has his father’s imposing build and forceful personality, but with a quieter, more scholarly mien, first planned on a career as a chef and did a post-culinary-school apprenticeship at Thomas Keller’s Per Se restaurant in Manhattan in 2005.

“It was very much like the world of a hospital, where you’re on your feet the whole time, you have to make the right decisions very quickly, and you have to be highly self-motivated while also working as part of a team,” Mr. Maring said. Nor was Mr. Keller’s keen appraisal of the neophyte’s technique unlike the scrutiny he now endures on hospital rotations. “I remember being at the pass” — the area closest to the dining room — “about to sauce a plate, and Keller came and stood right next to me,” Mr. Maring said. “I was so nervous. I was trying to artfully drizzle a broken foie gras vinaigrette, and my hand was just shaking. He jokingly asked if I had had too much caffeine.”

Mr. Maring is encouraged that CHEF’s feedback surveys show students are developing confidence in their cooking skills, making better food choices and feeling more comfortable talking to patients about the links between diet and health. He is developing recipes geared to the seasonal offerings at a new farmers’ market at Bellevue Hospital Center, adjacent to the N.Y.U. medical campus, which was begun in July by Aviva Regev, 24, a third-year student and CHEF participant.

Mr. Maring has another ally in Benjamin Navot, 25, a third-year student who entered medical school directly after graduating from the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan and has taught some CHEF classes. Mr. Navot acknowledged that, like Mr. Maring, his perspective on food is greatly influenced by his previous experience. But he, too, senses a widespread interest in food and healthy eating among his peers.

But the older generation can pick up a few new tricks, too. Preston Maring said that in some ways, his attempts to get more fresh local foods into hospitals have been reminiscent of his days as a young resident at Kaiser, particularly the need to climb a steep learning curve.

“I became the person who asks dumb questions constantly,” he said of the time he has spent over the last couple of years studying the technical aspects of food-distribution systems. “I just learned, for example, that cherry tomatoes with the stems still on are a no-go in an inpatient setting, and that at Kaiser there’s a specific size limit for an apple on a tray, because they’re stacked vertically for delivery.”

Kaiser Permanente, which is a provider and an insurer, is the largest nonprofit health care system in the country, with about 8 million members, 15,000 doctors and 170,000 employees, predominantly in western states. The sheer scale of Kaiser, which holds farmers’ markets at 30 sites, makes changing the way food is bought a challenge, but also an opportunity.

“We can leverage our size to create greater demand for healthy food,” Dr. Maring said. Kaiser Permanente Oakland, for example, serves 6,000 inpatient meals a day, 80 percent of which have no special restrictions.

“It’s difficult for farmers to crack the institutional supply chain,” he said. “We need a ‘universal adapter’ that can pair small producers with big customers.” Toward that end, he helped start a regional growers’ cooperative and joined the board of the nonprofit entity that administers it, the Community Alliance With Family Farmers.

Dr. Maring also envisions Kaiser’s role expanding into areas like environmental stewardship, and he has carved out a kind of subspecialty in institutional real estate, with the goal of eventually putting some of Kaiser’s undeveloped land into agriculture.

“As someone who relies on evidence-based medicine, it bothers me that we don’t have clear metrics to guide these food-related initiatives,” he said. “But for now, I remind myself of the enduring value of another care-giving principle: common sense.”

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BWN - Health v5

2010-09-29T14:15:00.001-07:00

Published on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 by TEDx (via Civil Eats)

11-Year-Old Describes Broken Food System in Five Minutes

As Posted at Civil Eats by Paula Crossfield

Last month, an 11-year-old had much to say about the perils of the American food system. Speaking at a TED conference for young people called TEDx in Asheville, North Carolina, Birke Baehr discussed food irradiation, GMOs, CAFOs, farm run-off, the problem with marketing food to kids and more, all in five minutes. On the subject of paying more for better quality food, Baehr said, “With all the things I’m learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or pay the hospital.”

He also talked about his future aspirations. “Awhile back I wanted to be an NFL football player. Now, I’ve decided I’d rather be an organic farmer instead,” he said to the cheering audience. “That way I can have a greater impact on the world.”

Watch it here:
http://www.tedxnextgenerationasheville.com/presenterbios

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Storks Return As Community Eliminates Pesticides & Restores Habitats

Japan Looks to Ancient Village Wisdom to Save Biodiversity

Flex Muscle To Make Better Choices - Over Rides Compulsive Choices

Medical science discovers remarkable yet simple way to instantly increase your willpower

Robert Fisk: The Shaming of America - USA Disgraceful Deceit & Brutality In The Iraq War

The Shaming of America

Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US

How to opt out of the TSA's naked body scanners at the airpor

Why can't the rest of the world get along??

The Essential ODFL Fundraising Kit
& Supplemental Resources